MP3

MP3, formally MPEG-1 Audio Layer III or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III, is a lossy audio coding scheme developed largely by the Fraunhofer Society in Germany under the lead of Karlheinz Brandenburg. It was designed to greatly reduce the amount of data needed to represent sound while still sounding like a faithful copy of the original to most listeners. The method reduces the precision of the encoded data and partially discards some of it, and compared with CD quality digital audio it can commonly cut file size by 75 to 95 percent depending on the bit rate. Layer III was defined in 1991 as one of three audio codecs of the MPEG-1 standard, alongside Layer I and Layer II, and the options were extended in the MPEG-2 standard with more bit rates and support for more audio channels. In everyday use the name also stands for the .mp3 file format that holds an MPEG audio stream. The small size and acceptable fidelity drove a boom in music distribution over the Internet in the late 1990s, and MP3 support became near universal in portable players and phones, so that it remains a de facto standard for digital audio even beside newer formats such as AAC and FLAC.