How mp3's work
The MP3 movement has been one of the Internet's most amazing phenomenas to hit the music industry!
Unlike other formats like cassette tape or CD's, the MP3 format was NOT started by the Industry itself,
but by an audience of music lovers on the Internet. MP3 has had a huge impact on how people collect and listen to music,
and has also opened a whole new way of actually distributing music, which is what the format is really aimed at.
The MP3 format uses compression algorithms for images all the time. For example, a GIF file is a compressed image. So is a JPG file. We create ZIP files to compress text.
So we are familiar with compression algorithm. For example
- There are certain sounds that the human ear cannot hear.
- There are certain sounds that the human ear hears much better than others.
- If there are two sounds playing simultaneously, we hear the louder one but cannot hear the softer one.
Using these facts we can actually eliminate parts of the song without significantly hurting the quality of the song.
Then compressing the rest of the song is easy by using well-known compression techniques, that can shrink the song considerably, by at least 10 fold.
When you're done creating an MP3 file, what you have is a near CD quality song.
The mp3 version of the song does not sound exactly the same as the original CD song, this is due to the fact that some of the background sounds have been removed.
Many people say that by removing these frequencies you can remove the feel of the music.
From this quick description you can see that MP3 is nothing magical, in fact it is simply a file format that gives it's users the ablity move their music files around much easier over the Internet.
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