Invented in 1991, MPEG (Motion Picture Experts Group) Layer 3 – file type better known under the name of mp3 – asserted itself in less than 10 months from the launch as the most performing audio format on the web. And it is no wonder: the sound is excellent, Downloads are fast, and the variety of the products available in this format is overwhelming. The huge competition in the online audio war between Real Audio and Shock Wave produced by Macromedia was over almost at once by this newcomer.

Mp3 is digital form of compression audio streams that came to life after 15 years of acoustic research. Mp3 can make an audio file up to 12 times smaller than the original file. Being so small the mp3file still has all the perceptible audio details, giving up only those that most people cannot hear.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Caveat emptor - many different mp3 converters exist in today's marketplace, and with a variety of encoding quality. You may notice "bad quality" on some mp3 files depending on the applications used to create it, the settings chosen by the user, and on the bit rate.
--Donnie

According to the declaration of engineers from the Fraunhoffer Institute, a pioneer company in the mp3 technology, this system explores the properties of the human ear, trying to maintain the original sound quality, in the boundaries of what is possible. Although it is not as clear as an audio CD, an mp3 still is an enormous realization when it comes to sound quality for such a big compression rate.

Another huge advantage the mp3 format represents is the stocking capacity. Five minutes of music on a CD take up about 40 MB, but if they were in mp3 format they could take only 3 to 5 MB.

It is very simple to create and distribute mp3s; most music players such as iTunes and Windows Media Player have the capability built-in to convert WAV and AIFF files to the Mp3 format. You can go with standard 128kbps files or as high as 320kbps on most media players. Higher bit rates are available in many professional-level converters and recording programs such as Sony Vegas, Sonar, ACID, etc.