Page 1 of what does mp3 mean?

im sorry for being a total nitwit, but what does mp3 mean

This item was edited on Monday, 11th November 2002, 21:55

Good old Whatis.com will explain best...

http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/0,,sid9_gci212600,00.html

MP3 is the abbreviation for MPeG1 Audio Layer 3 - where MPeG comes from MovingPicturesExperts Group which is a standard to compress movie data. MP3 audio compression enables users to lower the size of an audio file by on twelth of the original size - in acceptable (near CD) quality. One minute of MP3 compressed music takes up around one Mb of storage space (without compression one minute of music takes up to 30 Mb!). The descendant format to MP3 is AAC.

Hope this helps.

The exact compressions available with an mp3 file varies - you can select various sample rates; the higher the rate, the better the sound quality, but the larger the file (but even very high quality will still result in a smaller file size than raw audio data). Real Player, Windows Media Player etc. can all create mp3 files from a CD, and you can set the sample rate you want in the options screen of either player. Microsoft also have a similar format - WMA (Windows Media Audio).

In my experience, to get reasonable sound quality (trading off quality with file size), mp3 files need to sample at 128kbs, whereas you can get away with 96kbs for a WMA file to get a similar sound (this is for an mp3 player used in a car, where background noise will hide a lot of sins!). If you have an mp3 player that can take WMAs (or you want to save a bit more space on your hard disk), go for WMA.

Shaun

This item was edited on Tuesday, 12th November 2002, 08:49

There is also Mp3 Pro who` files are half the size for the same quality. I`m not going to use it until I have a DVD player which will fully except them. (It will play them but not at the optimum quality)