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. It's unencumbered by patents and features flexible comment headers and compression that's superior to that of MP3. It's also complete and utter crap. The only people who like .ogg files are wankers who don't care about sound quality and/or are too fucking lazy to seed their snatches on private trackers. This is an easy troll to use against both of the Vorbis supporters out there. All in all, It's not widely used. There must be a reason.

See Also

• FLAC
• Audiophile

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