The Music Web FAQ

What is an MP3?

An MP3 is an audio file that has been efficiently compressed using the “MPEG Audio Layer-3” format. This is simply a very smart way to encode audio files so that they have relatively small sizes, but still offer nearly the same sound quality, which makes them well suited to sharing music over the internet. 

On average, one minute of music takes up about one megabyte. The term “MP3” is the abbreviation used as the file extension for files compressed in this format – they all end with “.mp3”. The MP3 encoding process works by using knowledge of human hearing to identify and leave out sounds that humans are unlikely to be able to distinguish, such as very high frequencies or tones which are overshadowed by louder tones. 

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