How MP3 Music Is Made
The mp3 format has changed the way music is distributed, sold and played. It’s a mathematical trick that takes digitized music and compresses it down to the size of a single CD track. In the 1990s, it allowed file-sharing and swapping of audio files to become popular online. In addition, it was used in portable MP3 players, such as the now defunct iPods, which were much smaller than a deck of cards and could store thousands of songs. Today, you’ll find the mp3 file format in all sorts of digital media devices, including smartphones, tablets and home media centers.
A normal sound track on a CD uses up huge amounts of space–the equivalent of one or two volumes of an Encyclopedia Britannica. That’s because a CD holds a lot of information: the music as analog electrical signals and the information that turns those signals into sounds when they’re played back through a speaker system.
When an MP3 is made, the same process happens. A computer listens to a music track and samples the audio over and over, sampling the volume and frequency of each sound at a rate of 44,000 times per second. It then converts the resulting stream of numbers into data that’s easy for computers to process and store.
MP3 Music: Exploring the Benefits of Tubidy
The result is that a five-minute song takes up about 10MB when stored as an MP3 file. The quality of the MP3 is determined by a parameter called bitrate, which specifies how many kilobits per second (kbps) the data stream should be. Higher bit rates mean better quality, but also larger files.
In a typical MP3 file, there’s a header that contains some metadata, or information about the audio track, followed by the compressed music data in a series of chunks called frames. Each frame starts with a series of 1s and 0s that form a checksum of the data that will be stored in it, then the actual music begins.
MP3s get a bad rap for their sound quality, but the truth is that any compression algorithm will introduce some artifacts. Most people who listen to music on a high-end stereo will not be able to tell the difference between an mp3 and the original recording in most situations, especially if they don’t play it at full volume.
If you’re interested in getting the highest possible quality from your mp3 music, then it’s worth exploring lossless formats such as FLAC or ALAC. While these will take up more space on your hard drive, they preserve the audio data from the original recording and won’t compress it further.…