MP3
MP3, or MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3, is a digital audio coding format that uses "lossy" data compression to significantly reduce the size of sound files while retaining a level of quality acceptable to most listeners. It was developed by the Fraunhofer Society in Germany and became the de facto standard for music files in the late 1990s due to its efficiency.
How MP3 compression works: MP3 encoding is based on a concept called psychoacoustic modeling, which leverages how the human ear perceives sound. It employs the following techniques:
Perceptual noise shaping: The format analyzes the audio signal and discards sounds that the average human ear cannot perceive. This includes frequencies beyond our hearing range and quieter sounds that are "masked" by louder ones.
Reduced accuracy: For the remaining sound, MP3 reduces the accuracy of the encoded data, discarding further information that is unlikely to be missed by the listener.
Bitrate: The file size and quality are determined by the bitrate, or the number of bits per second used to encode the audio. A higher bitrate results in a larger file with better sound quality, while a lower bitrate produces a smaller file with more noticeable quality loss.
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