You have probably heard the name MP3 before, and have seen MP3 players
for sale, or read your DVD player will also play an MP3 disk. But what
exactly is MP3..
In 1987, the Fraunhofer IIS started to work on audio coding for digital
audio broadcasting (DAB). In a joint cooperation with the University of
Erlangen, the Fraunhofer IIS finally devised a very powerful algorithm that
is standardized as ISO-MPEG Audio Layer-3
Compact disks (CD's)
The audio bandwidth of a digital audio signal, typically consist of 16
bit samples recorded at a sampling rate more than twice the actual audio
bandwidth (44.1 kHz) so for one second of stereo music in CD quality you
will have 1.400 Mbit
Compression
By using MPEG audio coding, you may shrink down the original sound data from
a CD by a factor of 12, without losing quality. Factors of 24 and even more
still maintain a sound quality that is significantly better than what you
get by just reducing the sampling rate and the resolution of your samples.
