Importance of MP3 (digital music)

Music has always been present in societies around the world, and with the passage of time and technological advances it has been locked in very diverse reproduction formats: cassette, LP, CD or Mini-Disc have been some of the most popular media in which people have taken their music favorite.

Software engineering made it possible for the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) to design a format for specific audio file extension .MP3, name given by the Fraunhofer Society in July 1995. The MP3 digital audio format would become popular from the second half of the last decade of the 90s thanks to Internet, P2P networks and the commercialization of the first MP3 players (MPMan and Rio PMP300).

The digital audio format MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III (MP3) is the most important of all time, even ahead of the WMA, FLAC, OGG or AAC, readable by any electronic media player: televisions, CD/Blu-ray/DVD players, car radios, portable MP4 and MP3 players, PCs, Tablets, mobile phones, compact audio systems, stereos compact….

MP3 music has had a huge impact on the society modern and hyper-connected, and has made it possible for people to carry vast music libraries in as little space as a micro SD memory card.

MP3 quickly displaced CD-Audio, a format that is only capable of storing music with a standardized maximum of 80 minutes of length. playback and about 20 tracks per CD: the data CD, with MP3 tracks, is capable of storing about 150 tracks per disc (at a rate of 5MB per CD). clue).

The MP3, with a maximum audio quality of 320KBps and an acceptable minimum of 128Kbps, would conquer lovers of digital music and would facilitate the “physical” compaction of music libraries: going from individual 80-minute discs (700MB) to hard drives laptops between 250 and 500GB or USB sticks of 8GB/16GB... being able to store thousands of albums in devices smaller than the size of an Apple iPhone.

The MP3 would also change the style of music players, in addition to changing to smaller, more versatile and manageable formats. From large, clunky portable CD players to tiny devices like the iPod Shuffle.

The change from a CD-Audio drive to integrated physical memories or micro SD would also favor the use of music players in sports activities, thus avoiding skipping between tracks due to to the motion: the new storage medium would solve the typical deterioration of optical drives, with a tendency to scratch in a more or less careless use.

MP3 music would drastically reduce file size, from around 50MB on CD-Audio tracks (.wav files on PCs) to 5MB or less on MPEG-2. Audio Layer III (according to encoding quality): this would favor sending tracks by email, sharing them through P2P networks (.torrent), bluetooth or your cloud storage (DropBox, BOX…).

The MP3 music format is preferred by the general public, ahead of others such as OGG, FLAC, WMA or AAC: greater diffusion, and greater compatibility of the format with devices of electronics of consumption.

The MP3 has also contributed to a greater accessibility of musical content, its organization in devices digital, management and copying of the tracks on computers and mobile devices, and editing of the information attached to each track.

The MP3 and its full compatibility in devices commonly used by users has favored the legal downloading (online stores, such as iTunes or Amazon) and illegal downloading (download pages and social networks). P2P).

Thanks to the success of MP3, listening to music on any device with speakers, or to which headphones can be connected, is an activity simple: conventional digital music players (MP4 and/or MP3) are being replaced by Smartphones, with accessible memory of minimum 16GB).

MP3 has become the most important and widespread digital audio format of all time.