MP3

MP3 is an audio compression format which replaced wav and aiff around the web 1.0 era. it can squeeze the fuck out of your random sound recordings of you, your friends, your unfunny jokes or your singing friends. With their small size, they can easily be shared on the Internets, which eventually resulted in lawsuits from the RIAA. Just seed MOAR.

A japanese mp3 player

Audiophiles and DJs enjoy whining and complaining about how poor the quality of MP3 files are - how certain frequencies are distorted, and how awful the compression artifacts sound. Apple uses an AAC compression format that is touted to be of higher quality. Most people cannot tell the difference between CD audio and MP3s, especially when it's encoded at a compression rate higher than the 128kbps standard and played on shitty computer speakers. A lot of audio on the internets is thus encoded at 160 and 196kbps for higher fidelity. However, the bit rate needed to make Insane Clown Posse sound "high fidelity" is estimated to be infinity (1411kb/s, actually).

Ogg Vorbis

There is another sound compression format called Ogg Vorbis; which has a better compression ratio, but you wait more miliseconds for the file to open, because it's too damn compressed, which is why nobody uses it, crossfading? no, you need to buffer more, for playing ogg vorbis files. Media players are not optimized for using the ogg decoders. When you use ogg vorbis, that won't make the whole world muse ogg vorbis with you just because you are leading people to.

See Also

• FLAC
• Audiophile

MP3 is part of a series on Music Visit the Music Portal for complete coverage.