About MP3s

With the continual advancement of technology in both the computer industry and the music industry, the term 'MP3' seems to be popping up everywhere. Albums are released in MP3 format and car radios and DVD players are sold with MP3 reading capabilities. Even more popular are the MP3 players, which are incredibly small but are capable of storing thousands of songs. But what exactly are MP3s?

MP3 is an abbreviated form of MPEG-1, Layer 3. Simply put, it is a type of audio format that compresses standard audio tracks at a 12:1 ratio without significantly changing the sound quality. MPEG stands for Motion Picture Experts Group which is the company that developed the compression format. What this basically means is that by converting an audio file to MP3 format, you get to save a lot of space on your hard drive but you don’t have to sacrifice quality in order to do it. This has led to the MP3 format becoming an incredibly popular way to store music. As a result, most musicians striving to break into the music scene today will have most of their work if not all of it in MP3 format at some stage.

If you are looking at recording your work, or just storing a couple of favorite songs on your PC, it would be a good idea to consider using the MP3 format. It is also a handy for storing a large volume of music on a single CD – but of course this can only be used in machinery with the correct capabilities. Whatever the case, we hope that our brief explanation of MP3 help you to understand this global trend a little better.