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What is MP3? |
Mpeg is a high performing multimedia compression method. Because there is a small quality loss it's not possible to use it for anything else but multimedia data. The eye or the ear doesn't detect this quality loss, because it's not sensitive to details. The most common mpeg formats are JPG, MPG and MP3.
I have prepared a table that describes sample sizes and compares raw data with the similar mpeg-compressed data. Just click right here!
The handy size of the MP3 is one of the reasons why this compression method has become a big problem for the international music business. It would be possible to distribute raw audio data, but if we're talking about a 5 minutes long song it would be quite big. Nobody would have the time to download a 50 megabytes long wave file, just for fun! And if someone did, it would have been so few that it wouldn't be any problem, but since MP3 is here, anyone can download the same song - because it's only 4.2 megabytes. MP3 itself is NOT illegal, but distributing songs without proper authorization is. So if you create your own music - feel free to distribute it as a MP3 over the internet.