MP3 stands for MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3, and was developed by the Motion Pictures Expert Group. It’s an encoding format that uses lossy data compression to seriously crunch audio files down from the high fidelity original into a much more manageable size, nearly universal to modern portable audio players.
MP3 popularity exploded with the rise of the original Napster, a peer-to-peer file sharing program that allowed users to share songs in MP3 format without paying for them. The relatively small size of MP3-format files made this type of file sharing relatively painless, even on slower dial-up connections that were popular at the time it emerged. This type of file sharing is technically illegal and a form of copyright infringement, and once word spread, the sharing of music over the Internet became quite the hot button issue.
Such file sharing still takes place today, but rather than trying to fight it with brick-and-mortar retail, smart publishers have embraced the digitial distribution model, such as Apple's iTunes Store and the DRM-free Amazon MP3 music downloading service.
MP3 achieves its high compression by factoring out aspects of the recording that are generally inaudible to people anyway. Removing those portions and recording the remainder in a more efficient way can cut down file sizes by 90% or more from the original cut, depending on the bit rate. Run of the mill 128kbps bit rate would sound okay, though not considered hi-fi by audiophiles. The higher the bit rate, the better the quality, and the larger the file, and vice versa.
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