MP3 Audio Format

By Dan Hope

This format is by far the most common in digital music. Nearly every digital music player and computer can play MP3 files. The extension stands for MPEG, audio layer 3. There are three standard ways to compress audio signals and MP3 uses the third layer.

The MP3 format was first developed in the late 1980s and early 90s and became the ISO/IEC standard in 1991. In 1994, the first public encoder was released for the MPEG-3 format and the developers chose the .mp3 file extension. The format became popular throughout 1995 and has continued to gain popularity up to the present.

The MP3 format uses audio coding and compression to remove all the extraneous information from an audio signal that the human ear can’t hear anyway. This allows the audio files to be much smaller but still have good quality. The small file size made them especially popular for use on the internet and in download content. The popularity of MP3s expanded from there and the format is still a staple of digital music.

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