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MPEG-1 and/or MPEG-2 Audio Layer 3 (MP3) is a lossy data compression format for audio. Using it makes smaller computer files containing digitized music and other sounds.

Overview[change | change source]

The format is a lossy compression format. This means that each time something is compressed with it, some information is lost. This information can not be recovered. When encoding to MP3 converting some audio data to it), the encoder is smart. The human ear can not hear certain sounds if they are masked by other sounds. This means that when encoding certain sound samples, some sounds can be left out as they will not be heard. This makes it possible to compress audio by a factor of about 5, without noticeable change to the sound of the music. With slight audible changes to the sound, compression factors of about 10 are possible.


Other formats for audio compression are Ogg Vorbis, and FLAC. Ogg Vorbis is very similar to MP3, although it has many improvements. FLAC is a lossless compression meaning no information is lost, and gets compression rates of 2-3.

History[change | change source]

In the 1980s, Dieter Seitzer started the development of a code for audio format of high-quality. Together with his team at the German Fraunhofer Institut in Erlangen, the professor had the idea to create code with a low bit-rate. The German institute received the patent for MP3 in 1989. MP3 was then passed to the International Organisation for Standardisation. In the same year the MP3 was included into MPEG-1 specification. (MPEG means Moving Picture Experts Group).

The first player for the MP3 format was designed by the same Fraunhofer Institute in 1990's. A Croatian student named Tomislav Uzelac developed AMP MP3 Playback Engine in 1997. After the player appeared on the Internet, two students named Justin Frankel and Dmitry Boldyrev transformed it into Winamp. They took the engine of the original player and added the interface of the famous Windows.[source?]


MP3 players[change | change source]


Technical details[change | change source]

When compressing, for each frame a small section of audio, the encoder first splits the audio into 32 different parts using a filter bank, similar to MP2. The audio is then split further into either 192 or 576 different parts (depending on the complexity of the audio being compressed more complex audio is split into fewer parts using the modified discrete cosine transform. The MP3 encoder then removes parts that it thinks the human ear cannot hear. The remaining parts are then compressed using Huffman coding. Decompression does these same steps except removal of parts of the audio in reverse.

Timeline[change | change source]

  • 1989 MP3 is patented in Germany
  • 1993 MPEG-1 was published
  • 1994 MPEG-2 was designed; The first MP3 encoder for the PC (L3enc) was released.
  • 1995 MPEG-2 was published
  • 1996 MP3 is patented in United States
  • 1998 The LAME encoder is released.
  • 2017 The last MP3 patents expire.

Related pages[change | change source]

Other websites[change | change source]