MP3?... EM-PEE-THREE? What the heck is that?

I have heard this question from many people, not having an idea what I was talking about. Well, it's my job to clarify some things for you, and help you learn a little more about the technology known as 'mp3'. MP3 is a technology developed by the Fraunhofer Institute, and was adopted as a standard by the Motion Picture Experts Group (mpeg). Its full name is Mpeg-1 Layer III. Some of you may be confused by this, but for all my intents and purposes it's only a name.

MP3 is a sound format, just like the .wav format except for the fact that it provides CD quality sound in a compressed manner. The compression rate varies from about 10 to 15 times. This means that a 10 megabyte .wav file, will be around 1 megabyte as an MP3. This compression is created using a CoDec (compressor/decompressor). This is a piece of software that lets your computer work with MP3's. It can be built into your operating system, or just a simple little program such as WinAmp for windows, or mpg123 for linux.

I can imagine that some of you might be asking yourselves why file size is relevant to the topic, and who cares if sound clips are near CD quality, but it is very relvant. You see, with the size of an MP3 file being as much as 90 percent smaller, a new door is opened in respect to what you can make. If you have a CD that you just bought from your local store, and wish to make a back-up of your music, in the event that the original is broken. All you have to do is place the CD in your CD-Rom drive, use a program that converts the sound format in Compact Disks to the MP3 format, and you're set. If the original CD does ever break, you can always listen to the mp3's on your computers hard drive with and MP3 decoder program (such as Winamp), and because of the decreased file size you can keep multiple CD's on your hard drive without taking up a lot of space. Comparitively speaking a full Audio CD in its normal state takes over 650 MB of disk space, however if it is compressed into MP3s it is only 65-80 megs. If, by chance you ever wish to place the mp3's back together on a CD, all you would have to do is basically do the reverse of what you did to make an mp3, but I won't go into detail on that topic.

There has been much debate on the topic of mp3's. As you can imagine, with the power this technology gives to people, much more things than sound clips, and music back-ups can be made. Many high ranking executives in the music industry have voiced their opinion on the matter. Their argument is that people are putting their own music, that they have paid for, on to the internet for others who have not paid for the music, to download. Of course the neither the musicians or the music industry executives are receiving payment for the music downloaded, which of course makes money hungry music moguls angry. There is a great possibility, with the use of mp3's that a person will never pay for music again. All one would have to do is download their favourite songs, and somehow make a cd. The industry executives have gone to great lengths to stop this problem, some even going so far as to comb music chatrooms for 'ads' (for an mp3 server), find the email address of the proprietor of the server and threaten them into shutting their server down. As far as I am aware this has happened on only a few select occasions. Since the legalities of copyright infringment are different in other countries, I am leaving it for you to decide. Is MP3 is a beneficial technology to us, or a hindrance? As well, is there such an extreme risk of one person being caught for using MP3s in an impromper way, that we should fear using the technology?

As always, if you see a need, feel free to contact us on this matter. We really like to hear more than one opinion on any particular topic.

Since this is an ever changing area, you will surely see more and more articles related to the subject. So check back here frequently for updated news!

Links of Interest

• Winamp, an mp3 player
• MP3.Com a very large mp3 resource.
• Fraunhofer IIS Audio & Multimedia (the creators of MP3)