What Is MP3?
You probably use them all the time, and you know they have something to do with the music files on your computer, but the question remains: What is an MP3? Well, there are a lot of really complicated, technical definitions out there, but in layman’s terms, it’s pretty simple.
MP3 is the nickname for MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3, and it’s not really important that you understand all that, but MPEG stands for Moving Picture Experts Group. MPEG, according to its website, “is the name of a family of standards used for coding audio-visual information (e.g., movies, video, music) in a digital compressed format.”
What is MP3, really?
More simply put, MPEG is a group of engineers who figured out how to make your music take up less space on your computer. MP3 is the product of their labor – smaller files that take up less space so they upload, download and transmit faster. An MP3 file is strictly audio; it is never photo or video. What they’ve done is figured out a way to remove from an audio file all the things the human ear doesn’t really hear anyway, so that the file can become about an eleventh of its original size. That way, when you send it in an email, it goes faster, or when you download it from a website, it goes faster, and when you put it onto an MP3 player, you can fit more songs on there with it. Depending on the quality you require in your audio files and the amount of space you have available, MP3 files can be compressed to meet your specifications – less for higher-quality sound or more for greater compactness. As a photo file name often ends in “.jpg” or a Microsoft Word file name ends in “.doc,” the name of this type of file will end in “.mp3.” Now that you know what that means, you can enjoy your music in peace. Happy listening!