MP3 is the term for a patented digital audio encoding format. It is one of the most common digital audio formats and is the preferred format for storage and transfer of audio on portable media players.
Officially published in 1993, the MP3 format was created by the Moving Picture Experts Group as part of its MPEG-1 standard. Officially known as MPEG Audio Layer 3, the full name was “MPEG-1 Part 3″ which resulted in the more widely known name of MP3.
The MP3 standard uses a “lossy” data compression method which means that in order for the file size to be reduced, some of the bits are discarded. In practice, an audio file can be compressd by a factor of 10 without any perceptable loss of quality. These high compression rates make MP3 files ideal for audio storage as it reduces the bandwidth required for playback and transfer.
An MP3 file not only contains the information needed to play the audio content, but also contains metadata that is used to identify the content. This information is known as an “ID3 Tag” The ID3 tag contains information such as artist, album, genre, etc. There is no standard for the ID3 portion of the MP3 file, but the industry has developed several formats such as ID3v1 and ID3v2 and, more recently, APEv2.
- The technical underpinnings of an mp3 file can be viewed here:
http://www.mpgedit.org/mpgedit/mpeg_format/MP3Format.html


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Microsoft has been slowly releasing information on an interesting new product, but without a clear picture of its market placement. It looks to be basically a Tablet PC with 2 hinged displays that are multi-touch sensitive and no keyboard.
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