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MP3 (formally MPEG-1 Audio Layer III or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III) is a coding format for
digital audio Digital audio is a representation of sound recorded in, or converted into, digital form. In digital audio, the sound wave of the audio signal is typically encoded as numerical samples in a continuous sequence. For example, in CD audio, samp ...
developed largely by the
Fraunhofer Society The Fraunhofer Society (german: Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der angewandten Forschung e.V., lit=Fraunhofer Society for the Advancement of Applied Research) is a German research organization with 76institutes spread throughout Germany ...
in Germany, with support from other digital scientists in the United States and elsewhere. Originally defined as the third audio format of the
MPEG-1 MPEG-1 is a standard for lossy compression of video and audio. It is designed to compress VHS-quality raw digital video and CD audio down to about 1.5 Mbit/s (26:1 and 6:1 compression ratios respectively) without excessive quality loss, making ...
standard, it was retained and further extended — defining additional bit-rates and support for more audio channels — as the third audio format of the subsequent
MPEG-2 MPEG-2 (a.k.a. H.222/H.262 as was defined by the ITU) is a standard for "the generic coding of moving pictures and associated audio information". It describes a combination of lossy video compression and lossy audio data compression methods, ...
standard. A third version, known as MPEG 2.5 — extended to better support lower bit rates — is commonly implemented, but is not a recognized standard. MP3 (or mp3) as a
file format A file format is a standard way that information is encoded for storage in a computer file. It specifies how bits are used to encode information in a digital storage medium. File formats may be either proprietary or free. Some file format ...
commonly designates files containing an
elementary stream An elementary stream (ES) as defined by the MPEG communication protocol is usually the output of an audio encoder or video encoder. An ES contains only one kind of data (e.g. audio, video, or closed caption). An elementary stream is often referred ...
of MPEG-1 Audio or MPEG-2 Audio encoded data, without other complexities of the MP3 standard. With regard to audio compression (the aspect of the standard most apparent to end-users, and for which it is best known), MP3 uses lossy data-compression to encode data using inexact approximations and the partial discarding of data. This allows a large reduction in file sizes when compared to uncompressed audio. The combination of small size and acceptable fidelity led to a boom in the distribution of music over the Internet in the mid- to late-1990s, with MP3 serving as an enabling technology at a time when bandwidth and storage were still at a premium. The MP3 format soon became associated with controversies surrounding
copyright infringement Copyright infringement (at times referred to as piracy) is the use of works protected by copyright without permission for a usage where such permission is required, thereby infringing certain exclusive rights granted to the copyright holder, ...
, music piracy, and the file ripping/ sharing services MP3.com and
Napster Napster was a peer-to-peer file sharing application. It originally launched on June 1, 1999, with an emphasis on digital audio file distribution. Audio songs shared on the service were typically encoded in the MP3 format. It was founded by Sha ...
, among others. With the advent of
portable media player A portable media player (PMP) (also including the related digital audio player (DAP)) is a portable consumer electronics device capable of storing and playing digital media such as audio, images, and video files. The data is typically stored o ...
s, a product category also including
smartphones A smartphone is a portable computer device that combines mobile telephone and computing functions into one unit. They are distinguished from feature phones by their stronger hardware capabilities and extensive mobile operating systems, whic ...
, MP3 support remains near-universal. MP3 compression works by reducing (or approximating) the accuracy of certain components of sound that are considered (by psychoacoustic analysis) to be beyond the hearing capabilities of most humans. This method is commonly referred to as perceptual coding or as psychoacoustic modeling. The remaining audio information is then recorded in a space-efficient manner, using MDCT and FFT algorithms. Compared to CD-quality digital audio, MP3 compression can commonly achieve a 75 to 95% reduction in size. For example, an MP3 encoded at a constant bitrate of 128 kbit/s would result in a file approximately 9% of the size of the original CD audio. In the early 2000s, compact disc players increasingly adopted support for playback of MP3 files on data CDs. The
Moving Picture Experts Group The Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) is an alliance of working groups established jointly by ISO and IEC that sets standards for media coding, including compression coding of audio, video, graphics, and genomic data; and transmission and f ...
(MPEG) designed MP3 as part of its
MPEG-1 MPEG-1 is a standard for lossy compression of video and audio. It is designed to compress VHS-quality raw digital video and CD audio down to about 1.5 Mbit/s (26:1 and 6:1 compression ratios respectively) without excessive quality loss, making ...
, and later
MPEG-2 MPEG-2 (a.k.a. H.222/H.262 as was defined by the ITU) is a standard for "the generic coding of moving pictures and associated audio information". It describes a combination of lossy video compression and lossy audio data compression methods, ...
, standards. MPEG-1 Audio (MPEG-1 Part 3), which included MPEG-1 Audio Layer I, II and III, was approved as a committee draft for an ISO/
IEC The International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC; in French: ''Commission électrotechnique internationale'') is an international standards organization that prepares and publishes international standards for all electrical, electronic and r ...
standard in 1991, finalised in 1992, and published in 1993 as ISO/IEC 11172-3:1993. An MPEG-2 Audio (MPEG-2 Part 3) extension with lower sample- and bit-rates was published in 1995 as ISO/IEC 13818-3:1995. It requires only minimal modifications to existing MPEG-1 decoders (recognition of the MPEG-2 bit in the header and addition of the new lower sample and bit rates).


History


Background

The MP3 lossy audio-data compression algorithm takes advantage of a perceptual limitation of human hearing called auditory masking. In 1894, the American physicist Alfred M. Mayer reported that a tone could be rendered inaudible by another tone of lower frequency. In 1959, Richard Ehmer described a complete set of auditory curves regarding this phenomenon. Between 1967 and 1974, Eberhard Zwicker did work in the areas of tuning and masking of critical frequency-bands, which in turn built on the fundamental research in the area from
Harvey Fletcher Harvey Fletcher (September 11, 1884 – July 23, 1981) was an American physicist. Known as the "father of stereophonic sound", he is credited with the invention of the 2-A audiometer and an early electronic hearing aid. He was an investigator i ...
and his collaborators at
Bell Labs Nokia Bell Labs, originally named Bell Telephone Laboratories (1925–1984), then AT&T Bell Laboratories (1984–1996) and Bell Labs Innovations (1996–2007), is an American industrial research and scientific development company owned by mul ...
. Perceptual coding was first used for speech coding compression with
linear predictive coding Linear predictive coding (LPC) is a method used mostly in audio signal processing and speech processing for representing the spectral envelope of a digital signal of speech in compressed form, using the information of a linear predictive mod ...
(LPC), which has origins in the work of Fumitada Itakura (
Nagoya University , abbreviated to or NU, is a Japanese national research university located in Chikusa-ku, Nagoya. It was the seventh Imperial University in Japan, one of the first five Designated National University and selected as a Top Type university of ...
) and Shuzo Saito (
Nippon Telegraph and Telephone , commonly known as NTT, is a Japanese telecommunications company headquartered in Tokyo, Japan. Ranked 55th in ''Fortune'' Global 500, NTT is the fourth largest telecommunications company in the world in terms of revenue, as well as the third la ...
) in 1966. In 1978,
Bishnu S. Atal Bishnu S. Atal (born 1933) is an Indian physicist and engineer. He is a noted researcher in acoustics, and is best known for developments in speech coding. He advanced linear predictive coding (LPC) during the late 1960s to 1970s, and developed ...
and Manfred R. Schroeder at Bell Labs proposed an LPC speech
codec A codec is a device or computer program that encodes or decodes a data stream or signal. ''Codec'' is a portmanteau of coder/decoder. In electronic communications, an endec is a device that acts as both an encoder and a decoder on a signal or ...
, called
adaptive predictive coding Adaptive predictive coding (APC) is a narrowband analog-to-digital conversion that uses a one-level or multilevel sampling system in which the value of the signal at each sampling instant is predicted according to a linear function of the past valu ...
, that used a psychoacoustic coding-algorithm exploiting the masking properties of the human ear. Further optimisation by Schroeder and Atal with J.L. Hall was later reported in a 1979 paper. That same year, a psychoacoustic masking codec was also proposed by M. A. Krasner, who published and produced hardware for speech (not usable as music bit-compression), but the publication of his results in a relatively obscure
Lincoln Laboratory The MIT Lincoln Laboratory, located in Lexington, Massachusetts, is a United States Department of Defense federally funded research and development center chartered to apply advanced technology to problems of national security. Research and d ...
Technical Report did not immediately influence the mainstream of psychoacoustic codec-development. The discrete cosine transform (DCT), a type of
transform coding Transform coding is a type of data compression for "natural" data like audio signals or photographic images. The transformation is typically lossless (perfectly reversible) on its own but is used to enable better (more targeted) quantization, ...
for
lossy compression In information technology, lossy compression or irreversible compression is the class of data compression methods that uses inexact approximations and partial data discarding to represent the content. These techniques are used to reduce data si ...
, proposed by Nasir Ahmed in 1972, was developed by Ahmed with T. Natarajan and
K. R. Rao Kamisetty Ramamohan Rao was an Indian-American electrical engineer. He was a professor of Electrical Engineering at the University of Texas at Arlington (UT Arlington). Academically known as K. R. Rao, he is credited with the co-invention of di ...
in 1973; they published their results in 1974. This led to the development of the
modified discrete cosine transform The modified discrete cosine transform (MDCT) is a transform based on the type-IV discrete cosine transform (DCT-IV), with the additional property of being lapped: it is designed to be performed on consecutive blocks of a larger dataset, where ...
(MDCT), proposed by J. P. Princen, A. W. Johnson and A. B. Bradley in 1987, following earlier work by Princen and Bradley in 1986. The MDCT later became a core part of the MP3 algorithm. Ernst Terhardt ''et al.'' constructed an algorithm describing auditory masking with high accuracy in 1982. This work added to a variety of reports from authors dating back to Fletcher, and to the work that initially determined critical ratios and critical bandwidths. In 1985, Atal and Schroeder presented code-excited linear prediction (CELP), an LPC-based perceptual speech-coding algorithm with auditory masking that achieved a significant data compression ratio for its time.
IEEE The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is a 501(c)(3) professional association for electronic engineering and electrical engineering (and associated disciplines) with its corporate office in New York City and its operati ...
's refereed ''Journal on Selected Areas in Communications'' reported on a wide variety of (mostly perceptual) audio compression algorithms in 1988. The "Voice Coding for Communications" edition published in February 1988 reported on a wide range of established, working audio bit compression technologies, some of them using auditory masking as part of their fundamental design, and several showing real-time hardware implementations.


Development

The genesis of the MP3 technology is fully described in a paper from Professor Hans Musmann,Genesis of the MP3 Audio Coding Standard in IEEE Transactions on Consumer Electronics, IEEE, Vol. 52, Nr. 3, pp. 1043–1049, August 2006 who chaired the ISO MPEG Audio group for several years. In December 1988, MPEG called for an audio coding standard. In June 1989, 14 audio coding algorithms were submitted. Because of certain similarities between these coding proposals, they were clustered into four development groups. The first group was ASPEC, by
Fraunhofer Gesellschaft The Fraunhofer Society (german: Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der angewandten Forschung e.V., lit=Fraunhofer Society for the Advancement of Applied Research) is a German research organization with 76institutes spread throughout Germany ...
,
AT&T AT&T Inc. is an American multinational telecommunications holding company headquartered at Whitacre Tower in Downtown Dallas, Texas. It is the world's largest telecommunications company by revenue and the third largest provider of mobile ...
,
France Telecom Orange S.A. (), formerly France Télécom S.A. (stylized as france telecom) is a French multinational telecommunications corporation. It has 266 million customers worldwide and employs 89,000 people in France, and 59,000 elsewhere. In 2015, ...
, Deutsche and Thomson-Brandt. The second group was
MUSICAM MPEG-1 Audio Layer II or MPEG-2 Audio Layer II (MP2, sometimes incorrectly called Musicam or MUSICAM) is a lossy audio compression format defined by ISO/IEC 11172-3 alongside MPEG-1 Audio Layer I and MPEG-1 Audio Layer III (MP3). While MP3 is ...
, by Matsushita, CCETT, ITT and
Philips Koninklijke Philips N.V. (), commonly shortened to Philips, is a Dutch multinational conglomerate corporation that was founded in Eindhoven in 1891. Since 1997, it has been mostly headquartered in Amsterdam, though the Benelux headquarters is ...
. The third group was ATAC (ATRAC Coding), by
Fujitsu is a Japanese multinational information and communications technology equipment and services corporation, established in 1935 and headquartered in Tokyo. Fujitsu is the world's sixth-largest IT services provider by annual revenue, and the la ...
,
JVC JVC (short for Japan Victor Company) is a Japanese brand owned by JVCKenwood corporation. Founded in 1927 as the Victor Talking Machine Company of Japan and later as , the company is best known for introducing Japan's first televisions and for ...
,
NEC is a Japanese multinational information technology and electronics corporation, headquartered in Minato, Tokyo. The company was known as the Nippon Electric Company, Limited, before rebranding in 1983 as NEC. It provides IT and network soluti ...
and
Sony , commonly stylized as SONY, is a Japanese multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Minato, Tokyo, Japan. As a major technology company, it operates as one of the world's largest manufacturers of consumer and professional ...
. And the fourth group was SB-ADPCM, by NTT and BTRL. The immediate predecessors of MP3 were "Optimum Coding in the Frequency Domain" (OCF), and Perceptual Transform Coding (PXFM). These two codecs, along with block-switching contributions from Thomson-Brandt, were merged into a codec called ASPEC, which was submitted to MPEG, and which won the quality competition, but that was mistakenly rejected as too complex to implement. The first practical implementation of an audio perceptual coder (OCF) in hardware (Krasner's hardware was too cumbersome and slow for practical use), was an implementation of a psychoacoustic transform coder based on Motorola 56000 DSP chips. Another predecessor of the MP3 format and technology is to be found in the perceptual codec MUSICAM based on an integer arithmetics 32 sub-bands filterbank, driven by a psychoacoustic model. It was primarily designed for Digital Audio Broadcasting (digital radio) and digital TV, and its basic principles were disclosed to the scientific community by CCETT (France) and IRT (Germany) in Atlanta during an IEEE-ICASSP conference in 1991, after having worked on MUSICAM with Matsushita and Philips since 1989. This codec incorporated into a broadcasting system using COFDM modulation was demonstrated on air and in the field with Radio Canada and CRC Canada during the NAB show (Las Vegas) in 1991. The implementation of the audio part of this broadcasting system was based on a two-chips encoder (one for the subband transform, one for the psychoacoustic model designed by the team of
G. Stoll G is the seventh letter of the Latin alphabet. G may also refer to: Places * Gabon, international license plate code G * Glasgow, UK postal code G * Eastern Quebec, Canadian postal prefix G * Melbourne Cricket Ground in Melbourne, Australia, ...
(IRT Germany), later known as psychoacoustic model I) and a real time decoder using one Motorola 56001 DSP chip running an integer arithmetics software designed by Y.F. Dehery's team ( CCETT, France). The simplicity of the corresponding decoder together with the high audio quality of this codec using for the first time a 48 kHz sampling frequency, a 20 bits/sample input format (the highest available sampling standard in 1991, compatible with the AES/EBU professional digital input studio standard) were the main reasons to later adopt the characteristics of MUSICAM as the basic features for an advanced digital music compression codec. During the development of the MUSICAM encoding software, Stoll and Dehery's team made thorough use of a set of high-quality audio assessment material selected by a group of audio professionals from the European Broadcasting Union and later used as a reference for the assessment of music compression codecs. The subband coding technique was found to be efficient, not only for the perceptual coding of the high-quality sound materials but especially for the encoding of critical percussive sound materials (drums, triangle,...), due to the specific temporal masking effect of the MUSICAM sub-band filterbank (this advantage being a specific feature of short transform coding techniques). As a doctoral student at Germany's
University of Erlangen-Nuremberg A university () is an institution of higher (or tertiary) education and research which awards academic degrees in several academic disciplines. Universities typically offer both undergraduate and postgraduate programs. In the United States, the ...
,
Karlheinz Brandenburg Karlheinz Brandenburg (born 20 June 1954) is a German electrical engineer and mathematician. Together with Ernst Eberlein, Heinz Gerhäuser (former Institutes Director of Fraunhofer IIS), Bernhard Grill, Jürgen Herre and Harald Popp (all Fraunh ...
began working on digital music compression in the early 1980s, focusing on how people perceive music. He completed his doctoral work in 1989. MP3 is directly descended from OCF and PXFM, representing the outcome of the collaboration of Brandenburg — working as a postdoctoral researcher at AT&T-Bell Labs with James D. Johnston ("JJ") of AT&T-Bell Labs — with the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits, Erlangen (where he worked with
Bernhard Grill Bernhard Grill (born January 5, 1961) is one of the developers of the MP3 technology. Grill was born in Schwabach and studied Electrical Engineering at the Friedrich-Alexander-University, Erlangen-Nuremberg. From 1988 to 1995 he engaged in the de ...
and four other researchers – "The Original Six"), with relatively minor contributions from the MP2 branch of psychoacoustic sub-band coders. In 1990, Brandenburg became an assistant professor at Erlangen-Nuremberg. While there, he continued to work on music compression with scientists at the
Fraunhofer Society The Fraunhofer Society (german: Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der angewandten Forschung e.V., lit=Fraunhofer Society for the Advancement of Applied Research) is a German research organization with 76institutes spread throughout Germany ...
's Heinrich Herz Institute. In 1993, he joined the staff of Fraunhofer HHI. The song "
Tom's Diner "Tom's Diner" is a song written in 1982 by American singer and songwriter Suzanne Vega. It was first released as a track on the January 1984 issue of '' Fast Folk Musical Magazine''. Originally featured on her second studio album, '' Solitude St ...
" by
Suzanne Vega Suzanne Nadine Vega ( Peck; born July 11, 1959) is an American singer-songwriter best known for her folk-inspired music. Vega's music career spans almost 40 years. She came to prominence in the mid-1980s, releasing four singles that entered th ...
was the first song used by Karlheinz Brandenburg to develop the MP3 format. Brandenburg adopted the song for testing purposes, listening to it again and again each time he refined the scheme, making sure it did not adversely affect the subtlety of Vega's voice. Accordingly, he dubbed Vega the "Mother of MP3".


Standardization

In 1991, there were two available proposals that were assessed for an MPEG audio standard:
MUSICAM MPEG-1 Audio Layer II or MPEG-2 Audio Layer II (MP2, sometimes incorrectly called Musicam or MUSICAM) is a lossy audio compression format defined by ISO/IEC 11172-3 alongside MPEG-1 Audio Layer I and MPEG-1 Audio Layer III (MP3). While MP3 is ...
(Masking pattern adapted Universal Subband Integrated Coding And Multiplexing) and ASPEC (Adaptive Spectral Perceptual Entropy Coding). The MUSICAM technique, proposed by
Philips Koninklijke Philips N.V. (), commonly shortened to Philips, is a Dutch multinational conglomerate corporation that was founded in Eindhoven in 1891. Since 1997, it has been mostly headquartered in Amsterdam, though the Benelux headquarters is ...
(Netherlands), CCETT (France), the Institute for Broadcast Technology (Germany), and Matsushita (Japan), was chosen due to its simplicity and error robustness, as well as for its high level of computational efficiency. The MUSICAM format, based on
sub-band coding In signal processing, sub-band coding (SBC) is any form of transform coding that breaks a signal into a number of different frequency bands, typically by using a fast Fourier transform, and encodes each one independently. This decomposition is ...
, became the basis for the MPEG Audio compression format, incorporating, for example, its frame structure, header format, sample rates, etc. While much of MUSICAM technology and ideas were incorporated into the definition of MPEG Audio Layer I and Layer II, the filter bank alone and the data structure based on 1152 samples framing (file format and byte oriented stream) of MUSICAM remained in the Layer III (MP3) format, as part of the computationally inefficient hybrid filter bank. Under the chairmanship of Professor Musmann of the
Leibniz University Hannover Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz University Hannover (german: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Universität), also known as the University of Hannover, is a public research university located in Hanover, Germany. Founded on 2 May 1831 as Higher Vocational Sc ...
, the editing of the standard was delegated to Leon van de Kerkhof (Netherlands), Gerhard Stoll (Germany), and Yves-François Dehery (France), who worked on Layer I and Layer II. ASPEC was the joint proposal of AT&T Bell Laboratories, Thomson Consumer Electronics, Fraunhofer Society and
CNET ''CNET'' (short for "Computer Network") is an American media website that publishes reviews, news, articles, blogs, podcasts, and videos on technology and consumer electronics globally. ''CNET'' originally produced content for radio and televi ...
. It provided the highest coding efficiency. A
working group A working group, or working party, is a group of experts working together to achieve specified goals. The groups are domain-specific and focus on discussion or activity around a specific subject area. The term can sometimes refer to an interdis ...
consisting of van de Kerkhof, Stoll,
Leonardo Chiariglione Leonardo Chiariglione () (born 30 January 1943 (age ) in Almese, Turin province, Piedmont, Italy) is an Italian engineer who has led the development of international technical standards for digital media. In particular, he was the chairman of t ...
( CSELT VP for Media), Yves-François Dehery, Karlheinz Brandenburg (Germany) and James D. Johnston (United States) took ideas from ASPEC, integrated the filter bank from Layer II, added some of their own ideas such as the joint stereo coding of MUSICAM and created the MP3 format, which was designed to achieve the same quality at 128  kbit/s as MP2 at 192 kbit/s. The algorithms for MPEG-1 Audio Layer I, II and III were approved in 1991 and finalized in 1992 as part of
MPEG-1 MPEG-1 is a standard for lossy compression of video and audio. It is designed to compress VHS-quality raw digital video and CD audio down to about 1.5 Mbit/s (26:1 and 6:1 compression ratios respectively) without excessive quality loss, making ...
, the first standard suite by
MPEG The Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) is an alliance of working groups established jointly by ISO and IEC that sets standards for media coding, including compression coding of audio, video, graphics, and genomic data; and transmission and f ...
, which resulted in the international standard ISO/
IEC The International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC; in French: ''Commission électrotechnique internationale'') is an international standards organization that prepares and publishes international standards for all electrical, electronic and r ...
11172-3 (a.k.a. ''MPEG-1 Audio'' or ''MPEG-1 Part 3''), published in 1993. Files or data streams conforming to this standard must handle sample rates of 48k, 44100 and 32k and continue to be supported by current
MP3 player A portable media player (PMP) (also including the related digital audio player (DAP)) is a portable consumer electronics device capable of storing and playing digital media such as audio, images, and video files. The data is typically stored ...
s and decoders. Thus the first generation of MP3 defined interpretations of MP3 frame data structures and size layouts. Further work on MPEG audio was finalized in 1994 as part of the second suite of MPEG standards,
MPEG-2 MPEG-2 (a.k.a. H.222/H.262 as was defined by the ITU) is a standard for "the generic coding of moving pictures and associated audio information". It describes a combination of lossy video compression and lossy audio data compression methods, ...
, more formally known as international standard ISO/IEC 13818-3 (a.k.a. ''MPEG-2 Part 3'' or backwards compatible ''MPEG-2 Audio'' or ''MPEG-2 Audio BC''), originally published in 1995. MPEG-2 Part 3 (ISO/IEC 13818-3) defined 42 additional bit rates and sample rates for MPEG-1 Audio Layer I, II and III. The new sampling rates are exactly half that of those originally defined in MPEG-1 Audio. This reduction in sampling rate serves to cut the available frequency fidelity in half while likewise cutting the bitrate by 50%. MPEG-2 Part 3 also enhanced MPEG-1's audio by allowing the coding of audio programs with more than two channels, up to 5.1 multichannel. An MP3 coded with MPEG-2 results in half of the bandwidth reproduction of MPEG-1 appropriate for piano and singing. A third generation of "MP3" style data streams (files) extended the ''MPEG-2'' ideas and implementation, but was named ''MPEG-2.5'' audio, since MPEG-3 already had a different meaning. This extension was developed at Fraunhofer IIS, the registered patent holders of MP3, by reducing the frame sync field in the MP3 header from 12 to 11 bits. As in the transition from MPEG-1 to MPEG-2, MPEG-2.5 adds additional sampling rates exactly half of those available using MPEG-2. It thus widens the scope of MP3 to include human speech and other applications yet requires only 25% of the bandwidth (frequency reproduction) possible using MPEG-1 sampling rates. While not an ISO recognized standard, MPEG-2.5 is widely supported by both inexpensive Chinese and brand-name digital audio players as well as computer software based MP3 encoders ( LAME), decoders (FFmpeg) and players (MPC) adding additional MP3 frame types. Each generation of MP3 thus supports 3 sampling rates exactly half that of the previous generation for a total of 9 varieties of MP3 format files. The sample rate comparison table between MPEG-1, 2 and 2.5 is given later in the article. MPEG-2.5 is supported by LAME (since 2000), Media Player Classic (MPC), iTunes, and FFmpeg. MPEG-2.5 was not developed by MPEG (see above) and was never approved as an international standard. MPEG-2.5 is thus an unofficial or proprietary extension to the MP3 format. It is nonetheless ubiquitous and especially advantageous for low-bit-rate human speech applications. The ISO standard ISO/IEC 11172-3 (a.k.a. MPEG-1 Audio) defined three formats: the MPEG-1 Audio Layer I, Layer II and Layer III. The ISO standard ISO/IEC 13818-3 (a.k.a. MPEG-2 Audio) defined extended version of the MPEG-1 Audio: MPEG-2 Audio Layer I, Layer II and Layer III. MPEG-2 Audio (MPEG-2 Part 3) should not be confused with MPEG-2 AAC (MPEG-2 Part 7 – ISO/IEC 13818-7). Compression efficiency of encoders is typically defined by the bit rate, because compression ratio depends on the bit depth and
sampling rate In signal processing, sampling is the reduction of a continuous-time signal In mathematical dynamics, discrete time and continuous time are two alternative frameworks within which variables that evolve over time are modeled. Discrete time ...
of the input signal. Nevertheless, compression ratios are often published. They may use the
Compact Disc The compact disc (CD) is a digital optical disc data storage format that was co-developed by Philips and Sony to store and play digital audio recordings. In August 1982, the first compact disc was manufactured. It was then released in O ...
(CD) parameters as references (44.1 kHz, 2 channels at 16 bits per channel or 2×16 bit), or sometimes the Digital Audio Tape (DAT) SP parameters (48 kHz, 2×16 bit). Compression ratios with this latter reference are higher, which demonstrates the problem with use of the term ''compression ratio'' for lossy encoders. Karlheinz Brandenburg used a CD recording of
Suzanne Vega Suzanne Nadine Vega ( Peck; born July 11, 1959) is an American singer-songwriter best known for her folk-inspired music. Vega's music career spans almost 40 years. She came to prominence in the mid-1980s, releasing four singles that entered th ...
's song "
Tom's Diner "Tom's Diner" is a song written in 1982 by American singer and songwriter Suzanne Vega. It was first released as a track on the January 1984 issue of '' Fast Folk Musical Magazine''. Originally featured on her second studio album, '' Solitude St ...
" to assess and refine the MP3 compression algorithm. This song was chosen because of its nearly
monophonic Monaural or monophonic sound reproduction (often shortened to mono) is sound intended to be heard as if it were emanating from one position. This contrasts with stereophonic sound or ''stereo'', which uses two separate audio channels to reproduc ...
nature and wide spectral content, making it easier to hear imperfections in the compression format during playbacks. This particular track has an interesting property in that the two channels are almost, but not completely, the same, leading to a case where Binaural Masking Level Depression causes spatial unmasking of noise artifacts unless the encoder properly recognizes the situation and applies corrections similar to those detailed in the MPEG-2 AAC psychoacoustic model. Some more critical audio excerpts (
glockenspiel The glockenspiel ( or , : bells and : set) or bells is a percussion instrument consisting of pitched aluminum or steel bars arranged in a keyboard layout. This makes the glockenspiel a type of metallophone, similar to the vibraphone. The gloc ...
,
triangle A triangle is a polygon with three edges and three vertices. It is one of the basic shapes in geometry. A triangle with vertices ''A'', ''B'', and ''C'' is denoted \triangle ABC. In Euclidean geometry, any three points, when non- colline ...
,
accordion Accordions (from 19th-century German ''Akkordeon'', from ''Akkord''—"musical chord, concord of sounds") are a family of box-shaped musical instruments of the bellows-driven free-reed aerophone type (producing sound as air flows past a ree ...
, etc.) were taken from the EBU V3/SQAM reference compact disc and have been used by professional sound engineers to assess the subjective quality of the MPEG Audio formats. LAME is the most advanced MP3 encoder. LAME includes a VBR variable bit rate encoding which uses a quality parameter rather than a bit rate goal. Later versions (2008+) support an n.nnn quality goal which automatically selects MPEG-2 or MPEG-2.5 sampling rates as appropriate for human speech recordings which need only 5512 Hz bandwidth resolution.


Going public

A reference simulation software implementation, written in the C language and later known as ''ISO 11172-5'', was developed (in 1991–1996) by the members of the ISO MPEG Audio committee in order to produce bit compliant MPEG Audio files (Layer 1, Layer 2, Layer 3). It was approved as a committee draft of ISO/IEC technical report in March 1994 and printed as document CD 11172-5 in April 1994. It was approved as a draft technical report (DTR/DIS) in November 1994, finalized in 1996 and published as international standard ISO/IEC TR 11172-5:1998 in 1998. The reference software in C language was later published as a freely available ISO standard. Working in non-real time on a number of operating systems, it was able to demonstrate the first real time hardware decoding ( DSP based) of compressed audio. Some other real time implementations of MPEG Audio encoders and decoders were available for the purpose of digital broadcasting (radio
DAB DAB, dab, dabs, or dabbing may refer to: Dictionaries * '' Dictionary of American Biography'', published under the auspices of the American Council of Learned Societies * ''Dictionary of Australian Biography'', published since 1949 Places * Dą ...
, television
DVB Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB) is a set of international open standards for digital television. DVB standards are maintained by the DVB Project, an international industry consortium, and are published by a Joint Technical Committee (JTC) o ...
) towards consumer receivers and set top boxes. On 7 July 1994, the
Fraunhofer Society The Fraunhofer Society (german: Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der angewandten Forschung e.V., lit=Fraunhofer Society for the Advancement of Applied Research) is a German research organization with 76institutes spread throughout Germany ...
released the first software MP3 encoder, called
l3enc Fraunhofer l3enc was the first public software able to encode pulse-code modulation (PCM) .wav files to the MP3 format. The first public version was released on July 13, 1994. This commandline tool was shareware and limited to 112 kbit/s. It w ...
. The
filename extension A filename extension, file name extension or file extension is a suffix to the name of a computer file (e.g., .txt, .docx, .md). The extension indicates a characteristic of the file contents or its intended use. A filename extension is typically ...
''.mp3'' was chosen by the Fraunhofer team on 14 July 1995 (previously, the files had been named ''.bit''). With the first real-time software MP3 player
WinPlay3 WinPlay3 was the first real-time MP3 audio player for PCs running Windows, both 16-bit (Windows 3.1) and 32-bit (Windows 95). Prior to this, audio compressed with MP3 had to be decompressed prior to listening. It was released by Fraunhofer IIS ( ...
(released 9 September 1995) many people were able to encode and play back MP3 files on their PCs. Because of the relatively small
hard drive A hard disk drive (HDD), hard disk, hard drive, or fixed disk is an electro-mechanical data storage device that stores and retrieves digital data using magnetic storage with one or more rigid rapidly rotating platters coated with mag ...
s of the era (≈500–1000 MB) lossy compression was essential to store multiple albums' worth of music on a home computer as full recordings (as opposed to
MIDI MIDI (; Musical Instrument Digital Interface) is a technical standard that describes a communications protocol, digital interface, and electrical connectors that connect a wide variety of electronic musical instruments, computers, and ...
notation, or tracker files which combined notation with short recordings of instruments playing single notes).


Fraunhofer example implementation

A hacker named SoloH discovered the
source code In computing, source code, or simply code, is any collection of code, with or without comments, written using a human-readable programming language, usually as plain text. The source code of a program is specially designed to facilitate the ...
of the "dist10" MPEG reference implementation shortly after the release on the servers of the University of Erlangen. He developed a higher-quality version and spread it on the internet. This code started the widespread
CD ripping Ripping is extracting all or parts of digital content from a container. Originally, it meant to rip music out of Commodore 64 games. Later, the term was used to extract WAV or MP3 format files from digital audio CDs, but got applied as well to ext ...
and digital music distribution as MP3 over the internet.


Internet distribution

In the second half of the 1990s, MP3 files began to spread on the
Internet The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a '' network of networks'' that consists of private, p ...
, often via underground pirated song networks. The first known experiment in Internet distribution was organized in the early 1990s by the Internet Underground Music Archive, better known by the acronym IUMA. After some experiments using uncompressed audio files, this archive started to deliver on the native worldwide low-speed Internet some compressed MPEG Audio files using the MP2 (Layer II) format and later on used MP3 files when the standard was fully completed. The popularity of MP3s began to rise rapidly with the advent of
Nullsoft Nullsoft, Inc. was an American software house founded in Sedona, Arizona, in 1997 by Justin Frankel. Its products included the Winamp media player and the SHOUTcast MP3 streaming media server. In later years, their open source installer ...
's audio player
Winamp Winamp is a media player for Microsoft Windows originally developed by Justin Frankel and Dmitry Boldyrev by their company Nullsoft, which they later sold to AOL in 1999 for $80 million. It was then acquired by Radionomy in 2014. Since ve ...
, released in 1997. In 1998, the first portable solid state digital audio player MPMan, developed by SaeHan Information Systems, which is headquartered in
Seoul Seoul (; ; ), officially known as the Seoul Special City, is the Capital city, capital and largest metropolis of South Korea.Before 1972, Seoul was the ''de jure'' capital of the North Korea, Democratic People's Republic of Korea (North Korea ...
,
South Korea South Korea, officially the Republic of Korea (ROK), is a country in East Asia, constituting the southern part of the Korea, Korean Peninsula and sharing a Korean Demilitarized Zone, land border with North Korea. Its western border is formed ...
, was released and the Rio PMP300 was sold afterwards in 1998, despite legal suppression efforts by the
RIAA The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is a trade organization that represents the music recording industry in the United States. Its members consist of record labels and distributors that the RIAA says "create, manufacture, and/ ...
. In November 1997, the website mp3.com was offering thousands of MP3s created by independent artists for free. The small size of MP3 files enabled widespread
peer-to-peer Peer-to-peer (P2P) computing or networking is a distributed application architecture that partitions tasks or workloads between peers. Peers are equally privileged, equipotent participants in the network. They are said to form a peer-to-peer ...
file sharing File sharing is the practice of distributing or providing access to digital media, such as computer programs, multimedia (audio, images and video), documents or electronic books. Common methods of storage, transmission and dispersion include r ...
of music ripped from CDs, which would have previously been nearly impossible. The first large peer-to-peer filesharing network,
Napster Napster was a peer-to-peer file sharing application. It originally launched on June 1, 1999, with an emphasis on digital audio file distribution. Audio songs shared on the service were typically encoded in the MP3 format. It was founded by Sha ...
, was launched in 1999. The ease of creating and sharing MP3s resulted in widespread
copyright infringement Copyright infringement (at times referred to as piracy) is the use of works protected by copyright without permission for a usage where such permission is required, thereby infringing certain exclusive rights granted to the copyright holder, ...
. Major record companies argued that this free sharing of music reduced sales, and called it " music piracy". They reacted by pursuing lawsuits against
Napster Napster was a peer-to-peer file sharing application. It originally launched on June 1, 1999, with an emphasis on digital audio file distribution. Audio songs shared on the service were typically encoded in the MP3 format. It was founded by Sha ...
, which was eventually shut down and later sold, and against individual users who engaged in file sharing. Unauthorized MP3 file sharing continues on next-generation
peer-to-peer networks Peer-to-peer (P2P) computing or networking is a distributed application architecture that partitions tasks or workloads between peers. Peers are equally privileged, equipotent participants in the network. They are said to form a peer-to-peer n ...
. Some authorized services, such as
Beatport Beatport is an American electronic music-oriented online music store owned by LiveStyle. The company is based in Denver, Los Angeles, and Berlin. Beatport is oriented primarily towards DJs, selling full songs as well as resources that can be u ...
,
Bleep Bleep may refer to: * Bleep sound, a noise, generally of a single tone, often generated by a machine ** Bleep censor, the replacement of offensive language (swear words) or personal details with a beep sound ** Bleep techno, a Yorkshire-born subge ...
, Juno Records,
eMusic eMusic is an online music and audiobook store that operates by subscription. In exchange for a monthly subscription eMusic users can download a fixed number of MP3 tracks per month. eMusic was established in 1998, is headquartered in New York Cit ...
, Zune Marketplace, Walmart.com, Rhapsody, the recording industry approved re-incarnation of
Napster Napster was a peer-to-peer file sharing application. It originally launched on June 1, 1999, with an emphasis on digital audio file distribution. Audio songs shared on the service were typically encoded in the MP3 format. It was founded by Sha ...
, and Amazon.com sell unrestricted music in the MP3 format.


Design


File structure

An MP3 file is made up of MP3 frames, which consist of a header and a data block. This sequence of frames is called an
elementary stream An elementary stream (ES) as defined by the MPEG communication protocol is usually the output of an audio encoder or video encoder. An ES contains only one kind of data (e.g. audio, video, or closed caption). An elementary stream is often referred ...
. Due to the "bit reservoir", frames are not independent items and cannot usually be extracted on arbitrary frame boundaries. The MP3 Data blocks contain the (compressed) audio information in terms of frequencies and amplitudes. The diagram shows that the MP3 Header consists of a sync word, which is used to identify the beginning of a valid frame. This is followed by a bit indicating that this is the
MPEG The Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) is an alliance of working groups established jointly by ISO and IEC that sets standards for media coding, including compression coding of audio, video, graphics, and genomic data; and transmission and f ...
standard and two bits that indicate that layer 3 is used; hence MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3 or MP3. After this, the values will differ, depending on the MP3 file. '' ISO/
IEC The International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC; in French: ''Commission électrotechnique internationale'') is an international standards organization that prepares and publishes international standards for all electrical, electronic and r ...
11172-3'' defines the range of values for each section of the header along with the specification of the header. Most MP3 files today contain ID3
metadata Metadata is "data that provides information about other data", but not the content of the data, such as the text of a message or the image itself. There are many distinct types of metadata, including: * Descriptive metadata – the descriptive ...
, which precedes or follows the MP3 frames, as noted in the diagram. The data stream can contain an optional checksum. Joint stereo is done only on a frame-to-frame basis.


Encoding and decoding

The MP3 encoding algorithm is generally split into four parts. Part 1 divides the audio signal into smaller pieces, called frames, and a
modified discrete cosine transform The modified discrete cosine transform (MDCT) is a transform based on the type-IV discrete cosine transform (DCT-IV), with the additional property of being lapped: it is designed to be performed on consecutive blocks of a larger dataset, where ...
(MDCT) filter is then performed on the output. Part 2 passes the sample into a 1024-point
fast Fourier transform A fast Fourier transform (FFT) is an algorithm that computes the discrete Fourier transform (DFT) of a sequence, or its inverse (IDFT). Fourier analysis converts a signal from its original domain (often time or space) to a representation in ...
(FFT), then the psychoacoustic model is applied and another MDCT filter is performed on the output. Part 3 quantifies and encodes each sample, known as noise allocation, which adjusts itself in order to meet the
bit rate In telecommunications and computing, bit rate (bitrate or as a variable ''R'') is the number of bits that are conveyed or processed per unit of time. The bit rate is expressed in the unit bit per second (symbol: bit/s), often in conjunction ...
and sound masking requirements. Part 4 formats the
bitstream A bitstream (or bit stream), also known as binary sequence, is a sequence of bits. A bytestream is a sequence of bytes. Typically, each byte is an 8-bit quantity, and so the term octet stream is sometimes used interchangeably. An octet may ...
, called an audio frame, which is made up of 4 parts, the header, error check, audio data, and
ancillary data Ancillary data is data that has been added to given data and uses the same form of transport. Common examples are cover art images for media files or streams, or digital data added to radio or television broadcasts. Television Ancillary data (comm ...
. The
MPEG-1 MPEG-1 is a standard for lossy compression of video and audio. It is designed to compress VHS-quality raw digital video and CD audio down to about 1.5 Mbit/s (26:1 and 6:1 compression ratios respectively) without excessive quality loss, making ...
standard does not include a precise specification for an MP3 encoder, but does provide example psychoacoustic models, rate loop, and the like in the non-normative part of the original standard. MPEG-2 doubles the number of sampling rates which are supported and MPEG-2.5 adds 3 more. When this was written, the suggested implementations were quite dated. Implementers of the standard were supposed to devise their own algorithms suitable for removing parts of the information from the audio input. As a result, many different MP3 encoders became available, each producing files of differing quality. Comparisons were widely available, so it was easy for a prospective user of an encoder to research the best choice. Some encoders that were proficient at encoding at higher bit rates (such as LAME) were not necessarily as good at lower bit rates. Over time, LAME evolved on the SourceForge website until it became the de facto CBR MP3 encoder. Later an ABR mode was added. Work progressed on true variable bit rate using a quality goal between 0 and 10. Eventually numbers (such as -V 9.600) could generate excellent quality low bit rate voice encoding at only 41 kbit/s using the MPEG-2.5 extensions. During encoding, 576 time-domain samples are taken and are transformed to 576 frequency-domain samples. If there is a
transient ECHELON, originally a secret government code name, is a surveillance program (signals intelligence/SIGINT collection and analysis network) operated by the five signatory states to the UKUSA Security Agreement:Given the 5 dialects that us ...
, 192 samples are taken instead of 576. This is done to limit the temporal spread of quantization noise accompanying the transient (see
psychoacoustics Psychoacoustics is the branch of psychophysics involving the scientific study of sound perception and audiology—how humans perceive various sounds. More specifically, it is the branch of science studying the psychological responses associated wi ...
). Frequency resolution is limited by the small long block window size, which decreases coding efficiency. Time resolution can be too low for highly transient signals and may cause smearing of percussive sounds. Due to the tree structure of the filter bank, pre-echo problems are made worse, as the combined impulse response of the two filter banks does not, and cannot, provide an optimum solution in time/frequency resolution. Additionally, the combining of the two filter banks' outputs creates aliasing problems that must be handled partially by the "aliasing compensation" stage; however, that creates excess energy to be coded in the frequency domain, thereby decreasing coding efficiency. Decoding, on the other hand, is carefully defined in the standard. Most decoders are "
bitstream A bitstream (or bit stream), also known as binary sequence, is a sequence of bits. A bytestream is a sequence of bytes. Typically, each byte is an 8-bit quantity, and so the term octet stream is sometimes used interchangeably. An octet may ...
compliant", which means that the decompressed output that they produce from a given MP3 file will be the same, within a specified degree of
rounding Rounding means replacing a number with an approximate value that has a shorter, simpler, or more explicit representation. For example, replacing $ with $, the fraction 312/937 with 1/3, or the expression with . Rounding is often done to ob ...
tolerance, as the output specified mathematically in the ISO/IEC high standard document (ISO/IEC 11172-3). Therefore, comparison of decoders is usually based on how computationally efficient they are (i.e., how much
memory Memory is the faculty of the mind by which data or information is encoded, stored, and retrieved when needed. It is the retention of information over time for the purpose of influencing future action. If past events could not be remember ...
or
CPU A central processing unit (CPU), also called a central processor, main processor or just processor, is the electronic circuitry that executes instructions comprising a computer program. The CPU performs basic arithmetic, logic, controlling, a ...
time they use in the decoding process). Over time this concern has become less of an issue as CPU clock rates transitioned from MHz to GHz. Encoder/decoder overall delay is not defined, which means there is no official provision for gapless playback. However, some encoders such as LAME can attach additional metadata that will allow players that can handle it to deliver seamless playback.


Quality

When performing lossy audio encoding, such as creating an MP3 data stream, there is a trade-off between the amount of data generated and the sound quality of the results. The person generating an MP3 selects a
bit rate In telecommunications and computing, bit rate (bitrate or as a variable ''R'') is the number of bits that are conveyed or processed per unit of time. The bit rate is expressed in the unit bit per second (symbol: bit/s), often in conjunction ...
, which specifies how many kilobits per second of audio is desired. The higher the bit rate, the larger the MP3 data stream will be, and, generally, the closer it will sound to the original recording. With too low a bit rate,
compression artifact A compression artifact (or artefact) is a noticeable distortion of media (including images, audio, and video) caused by the application of lossy compression. Lossy data compression involves discarding some of the media's data so that it beco ...
s (i.e., sounds that were not present in the original recording) may be audible in the reproduction. Some audio is hard to compress because of its randomness and sharp attacks. When this type of audio is compressed, artifacts such as ringing or pre-echo are usually heard. A sample of applause or a triangle instrument with a relatively low bit rate provide good examples of compression artifacts. Most subjective testings of perceptual codecs tend to avoid using these types of sound materials, however, the artifacts generated by percussive sounds are barely perceptible due to the specific temporal masking feature of the 32 sub-band filterbank of Layer II on which the format is based. Besides the bit rate of an encoded piece of audio, the quality of MP3 encoded sound also depends on the quality of the encoder algorithm as well as the complexity of the signal being encoded. As the MP3 standard allows quite a bit of freedom with encoding algorithms, different encoders do feature quite different quality, even with identical bit rates. As an example, in a public listening test featuring two early MP3 encoders set at about 128 kbit/s, one scored 3.66 on a 1–5 scale, while the other scored only 2.22. Quality is dependent on the choice of encoder and encoding parameters. This observation caused a revolution in audio encoding. Early on bitrate was the prime and only consideration. At the time MP3 files were of the very simplest type: they used the same bit rate for the entire file: this process is known as
Constant Bit Rate Constant bitrate (CBR) is a term used in telecommunications, relating to the quality of service. Compare with variable bitrate. When referring to codecs, constant bit rate encoding means that the rate at which a codec's output data should be ...
(CBR) encoding. Using a constant bit rate makes encoding simpler and less CPU intensive. However, it is also possible to optimize size of the file by creating files where the bit rate changes throughout the file. These are known as
Variable Bit Rate Variable bitrate (VBR) is a term used in telecommunications and computing Computing is any goal-oriented activity requiring, benefiting from, or creating computing machinery. It includes the study and experimentation of algorithmic processe ...
. The bit reservoir and VBR encoding were actually part of the original MPEG-1 standard. The concept behind them is that, in any piece of audio, some sections are easier to compress, such as silence or music containing only a few tones, while others will be more difficult to compress. So, the overall quality of the file may be increased by using a lower bit rate for the less complex passages and a higher one for the more complex parts. With some advanced MP3 encoders, it is possible to specify a given quality, and the encoder will adjust the bit rate accordingly. Users that desire a particular "quality setting" that is transparent to their ears can use this value when encoding all of their music, and generally speaking not need to worry about performing personal listening tests on each piece of music to determine the correct bit rate. Perceived quality can be influenced by listening environment (ambient noise), listener attention, and listener training and in most cases by listener audio equipment (such as sound cards, speakers and headphones). Furthermore, sufficient quality may be achieved by a lesser quality setting for lectures and human speech applications and reduces encoding time and complexity. A test given to new students by
Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is conside ...
Music Professor Jonathan Berger showed that student preference for MP3-quality music has risen each year. Berger said the students seem to prefer the 'sizzle' sounds that MP3s bring to music. An in-depth study of MP3 audio quality, sound artist and composer Ryan Maguire's project "The Ghost in the MP3" isolates the sounds lost during MP3 compression. In 2015, he released the track "moDernisT" (an anagram of "Tom's Diner"), composed exclusively from the sounds deleted during MP3 compression of the song "Tom's Diner", the track originally used in the formulation of the MP3 standard. A detailed account of the techniques used to isolate the sounds deleted during MP3 compression, along with the conceptual motivation for the project, was published in the 2014 Proceedings of the International Computer Music Conference.


Bit rate

Bitrate is the product of the sample rate and number of bits per sample used to encode the music. CD audio is 44100 samples per second. The number of bits per sample also depends on the number of audio channels. CD is stereo and 16 bits per channel. So, multiplying 44100 by 32 gives 1411200—the bitrate of uncompressed CD digital audio. MP3 was designed to encode this 1411 kbit/s data at 320 kbit/s or less. As less complex passages are detected by MP3 algorithms then lower bitrates may be employed. When using MPEG-2 instead of MPEG-1, MP3 supports only lower sampling rates (16000, 22050 or 24000 samples per second) and offers choices of bitrate as low as 8 kbit/s but no higher than 160 kbit/s. By lowering the sampling rate, MPEG-2 layer III removes all frequencies above half the new sampling rate that may have been present in the source audio. As shown in these two tables, 14 selected
bit rate In telecommunications and computing, bit rate (bitrate or as a variable ''R'') is the number of bits that are conveyed or processed per unit of time. The bit rate is expressed in the unit bit per second (symbol: bit/s), often in conjunction ...
s are allowed in MPEG-1 Audio Layer III standard: 32, 40, 48, 56, 64, 80, 96, 112, 128, 160, 192, 224, 256 and 320 kbit/s, along with the 3 highest available sampling frequencies of 32, 44.1 and 48  kHz. MPEG-2 Audio Layer III also allows 14 somewhat different (and mostly lower) bit rates of 8, 16, 24, 32, 40, 48, 56, 64, 80, 96, 112, 128, 144, 160 kbit/s with sampling frequencies of 16, 22.05 and 24  kHz which are exactly half that of MPEG-1. MPEG-2.5 Audio Layer III frames are limited to only 8 bit rates of 8, 16, 24, 32, 40, 48, 56 and 64 kbit/s with 3 even lower sampling frequencies of 8, 11.025, and 12 kHz. On earlier systems that only support the MPEG-1 Audio Layer III standard, MP3 files with a bit rate below 32 kbit/s might be played back sped-up and pitched-up. Earlier systems also lack fast forwarding and rewinding playback controls on MP3. (2004
boombox A boombox is a transistorized portable music player featuring one or two cassette tape recorder/players and AM/FM radio, generally with a carrying handle. Beginning in the mid 1980s, a CD player was often included. Sound is delivered throu ...
)
MPEG-1 frames contain the most detail in 320 kbit/s mode, the highest allowable bit rate setting, with silence and simple tones still requiring 32 kbit/s. MPEG-2 frames can capture up to 12 kHz sound reproductions needed up to 160 kbit/s. MP3 files made with MPEG-2 don't have 20 kHz bandwidth because of the Nyquist–Shannon sampling theorem. Frequency reproduction is always strictly less than half of the sampling frequency, and imperfect filters require a larger margin for error (noise level versus sharpness of filter), so an 8 kHz sampling rate limits the maximum frequency to 4 kHz, while a 48 kHz sampling rate limits an MP3 to a maximum 24 kHz sound reproduction. MPEG-2 uses half and MPEG-2.5 only a quarter of MPEG-1 sample rates. For the general field of human speech reproduction, a bandwidth of 5512 Hz is sufficient to produce excellent results (for voice) using the sampling rate of 11025 and VBR encoding from 44100 (standard) WAV file. English speakers average 41–42 kbit/s with -V 9.6 setting but this may vary with amount of silence recorded or the rate of delivery (wpm). Resampling to 12000 (6K bandwidth) is selected by the LAME parameter -V 9.4. Likewise -V 9.2 selects 16000 sample rate and a resultant 8K lowpass filtering. For more information see Nyquist – Shannon. Older versions of LAME and FFmpeg only support integer arguments for the variable bit rate quality selection parameter. The n.nnn quality parameter (-V) is documented at lame.sourceforge.net but is only supported in LAME with the new style VBR variable bit rate quality selector—not average bit rate (ABR). A sample rate of 44.1 kHz is commonly used for music reproduction, because this is also used for
CD audio Compact Disc Digital Audio (CDDA or CD-DA), also known as Digital Audio Compact Disc or simply as Audio CD, is the standard format for audio compact discs. The standard is defined in the ''Red Book'', one of a series of Rainbow Books (named f ...
, the main source used for creating MP3 files. A great variety of bit rates are used on the Internet. A bit rate of 128 kbit/s is commonly used, at a compression ratio of 11:1, offering adequate audio quality in a relatively small space. As Internet bandwidth availability and hard drive sizes have increased, higher bit rates up to 320 kbit/s are widespread. Uncompressed audio as stored on an audio-CD has a bit rate of 1,411.2 kbit/s, (16 bit/sample × 44100 samples/second × 2 channels / 1000 bits/kilobit), so the bitrates 128, 160 and 192 kbit/s represent compression ratios of approximately 11:1, 9:1 and 7:1 respectively. Non-standard bit rates up to 640 kbit/s can be achieved with the LAME encoder and the freeformat option, although few MP3 players can play those files. According to the ISO standard, decoders are only required to be able to decode streams up to 320 kbit/s. Early MPEG Layer III encoders used what is now called
Constant Bit Rate Constant bitrate (CBR) is a term used in telecommunications, relating to the quality of service. Compare with variable bitrate. When referring to codecs, constant bit rate encoding means that the rate at which a codec's output data should be ...
(CBR). The software was only able to use a uniform bitrate on all frames in an MP3 file. Later more sophisticated MP3 encoders were able to use the bit reservoir to target an
average bit rate In telecommunications, average bitrate (ABR) refers to the average amount of data transferred per unit of time, usually measured per second, commonly for digital music or video. An MP3 file, for example, that has an average bit rate of 128 k ...
selecting the encoding rate for each frame based on the complexity of the sound in that portion of the recording. A more sophisticated MP3 encoder can produce
variable bitrate Variable bitrate (VBR) is a term used in telecommunications and computing that relates to the bitrate used in sound or video encoding. As opposed to constant bitrate (CBR), VBR files vary the amount of output data per time segment. VBR allows a ...
audio. MPEG audio may use bitrate switching on a per-frame basis, but only layer III decoders must support it. VBR is used when the goal is to achieve a fixed level of quality. The final file size of a VBR encoding is less predictable than with
constant bitrate Constant bitrate (CBR) is a term used in telecommunications, relating to the quality of service. Compare with variable bitrate. When referring to codecs, constant bit rate encoding means that the rate at which a codec's output data should be ...
. Average bitrate is a type of VBR implemented as a compromise between the two: the bitrate is allowed to vary for more consistent quality, but is controlled to remain near an average value chosen by the user, for predictable file sizes. Although an MP3 decoder must support VBR to be standards compliant, historically some decoders have bugs with VBR decoding, particularly before VBR encoders became widespread. The most evolved LAME MP3 encoder supports the generation of VBR, ABR, and even the older CBR MP3 formats. Layer III audio can also use a "bit reservoir", a partially full frame's ability to hold part of the next frame's audio data, allowing temporary changes in effective bitrate, even in a constant bitrate stream. Internal handling of the bit reservoir increases encoding delay. There is no scale factor band 21 (sfb21) for frequencies above approx 16  kHz, forcing the encoder to choose between less accurate representation in band 21 or less efficient storage in all bands below band 21, the latter resulting in wasted bitrate in VBR encoding.


Ancillary data

The ancillary data field can be used to store user defined data. The ancillary data is optional and the number of bits available is not explicitly given. The ancillary data is located after the Huffman code bits and ranges to where the next frame's main_data_begin points to. Encoder mp3PRO used ancillary data to encode extra information which could improve audio quality when decoded with its own algorithm.


Metadata

A "tag" in an audio file is a section of the file that contains
metadata Metadata is "data that provides information about other data", but not the content of the data, such as the text of a message or the image itself. There are many distinct types of metadata, including: * Descriptive metadata – the descriptive ...
such as the title, artist, album, track number or other information about the file's contents. The MP3 standards do not define tag formats for MP3 files, nor is there a standard
container format A container format (informally, sometimes called a wrapper) or metafile is a file format that allows multiple data streams to be embedded into a single file, usually along with metadata for identifying and further detailing those streams. No ...
that would support metadata and obviate the need for tags. However, several ''de facto'' standards for tag formats exist. As of 2010, the most widespread are ID3v1 and ID3v2, and the more recently introduced APEv2. These tags are normally embedded at the beginning or end of MP3 files, separate from the actual MP3 frame data. MP3 decoders either extract information from the tags, or just treat them as ignorable, non-MP3 junk data. Playing and editing software often contains tag editing functionality, but there are also tag editor applications dedicated to the purpose. Aside from metadata pertaining to the audio content, tags may also be used for DRM. ReplayGain is a standard for measuring and storing the loudness of an MP3 file (
audio normalization Audio normalization is the application of a constant amount of gain to an audio recording to bring the amplitude to a target level (the norm). Because the same amount of gain is applied across the entire recording, the signal-to-noise ratio and ...
) in its metadata tag, enabling a ReplayGain-compliant player to automatically adjust the overall playback volume for each file.
MP3Gain MP3Gain is an audio normalization software tool. The tool is available on multiple platforms and is free software. It analyzes the MP3 and reversibly changes its volume. The volume can be adjusted for single files or as album where all files woul ...
may be used to reversibly modify files based on ReplayGain measurements so that adjusted playback can be achieved on players without ReplayGain capability.


Licensing, ownership, and legislation

The basic MP3 decoding and encoding technology is patent-free in the European Union, all patents having expired there by 2012 at the latest. In the United States, the technology became substantially patent-free on 16 April 2017 (see below). MP3 patents expired in the US between 2007 and 2017. In the past, many organizations have claimed ownership of
patent A patent is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the legal right to exclude others from making, using, or selling an invention for a limited period of time in exchange for publishing an enabling disclosure of the invention."A ...
s related to MP3 decoding or encoding. These claims led to a number of legal threats and actions from a variety of sources. As a result, uncertainty about which patents must have been licensed in order to create MP3 products without committing patent infringement in countries that allow
software patent A software patent is a patent on a piece of software, such as a computer program, libraries, user interface, or algorithm. Background A patent is a set of exclusionary rights granted by a state to a patent holder for a limited period of time ...
s was a common feature of the early stages of adoption of the technology. The initial near-complete MPEG-1 standard (parts 1, 2 and 3) was publicly available on 6 December 1991 as ISO CD 11172. In most countries, patents cannot be filed after prior art has been made public, and patents expire 20 years after the initial filing date, which can be up to 12 months later for filings in other countries. As a result, patents required to implement MP3 expired in most countries by December 2012, 21 years after the publication of ISO CD 11172. An exception is the United States, where patents in force but filed prior to 8 June 1995 expire after the later of 17 years from the issue date or 20 years from the priority date. A lengthy patent prosecution process may result in a patent issuing much later than normally expected (see
submarine patent A submarine patent is a patent whose issuance and publication are intentionally delayed by the applicant for a long time, which can be several years, or a decade.
s). The various MP3-related patents expired on dates ranging from 2007 to 2017 in the United States. Patents for anything disclosed in ISO CD 11172 filed a year or more after its publication are questionable. If only the known MP3 patents filed by December 1992 are considered, then MP3 decoding has been patent-free in the US since 22 September 2015, when , which had a PCT filing in October 1992, expired. If the longest-running patent mentioned in the aforementioned references is taken as a measure, then the MP3 technology became patent-free in the United States on 16 April 2017, when , held and administered by
Technicolor Technicolor is a series of Color motion picture film, color motion picture processes, the first version dating back to 1916, and followed by improved versions over several decades. Definitive Technicolor movies using three black and white films ...
, expired. As a result, many
free and open-source software Free and open-source software (FOSS) is a term used to refer to groups of software consisting of both free software and open-source software where anyone is freely licensed to use, copy, study, and change the software in any way, and the source ...
projects, such as the Fedora operating system, have decided to start shipping MP3 support by default, and users will no longer have to resort to installing unofficial packages maintained by third party software repositories for MP3 playback or encoding.
Technicolor Technicolor is a series of Color motion picture film, color motion picture processes, the first version dating back to 1916, and followed by improved versions over several decades. Definitive Technicolor movies using three black and white films ...
(formerly called Thomson Consumer Electronics) claimed to control MP3 licensing of the Layer 3 patents in many countries, including the United States, Japan, Canada and EU countries. Technicolor had been actively enforcing these patents. MP3 license revenues from Technicolor's administration generated about €100 million for the Fraunhofer Society in 2005. In September 1998, the Fraunhofer Institute sent a letter to several developers of MP3 software stating that a license was required to "distribute and/or sell decoders and/or encoders". The letter claimed that unlicensed products "infringe the patent rights of Fraunhofer and Thomson. To make, sell or distribute products using the PEG Layer-3standard and thus our patents, you need to obtain a license under these patents from us." This led to the situation where the LAME MP3 encoder project could not offer its users official binaries that could run on their computer. The project's position was that as source code, LAME was simply a description of how an MP3 encoder ''could'' be implemented. Unofficially, compiled binaries were available from other sources. Sisvel S.p.A., a Luxembourg-based company, administers licenses for patents applying to MPEG Audio. They, along with its United States subsidiary Audio MPEG, Inc. previously sued Thomson for patent infringement on MP3 technology, but those disputes were resolved in November 2005 with Sisvel granting Thomson a license to their patents. Motorola followed soon after, and signed with Sisvel to license MP3-related patents in December 2005. Except for three patents, the US patents administered by Sisvel had all expired in 2015. The three exceptions are: , expired February 2017; , expired February 2017; and , expired 9 April 2017. In September 2006, German officials seized MP3 players from
SanDisk SanDisk is a brand for flash memory products, including memory cards and readers, USB flash drives, solid-state drives, and digital audio players, manufactured and marketed by Western Digital. The original company, SanDisk Corporation was acquir ...
's booth at the IFA show in Berlin after an Italian patents firm won an injunction on behalf of Sisvel against SanDisk in a dispute over licensing rights. The injunction was later reversed by a Berlin judge, but that reversal was in turn blocked the same day by another judge from the same court, "bringing the Patent Wild West to Germany" in the words of one commentator. In February 2007, Texas MP3 Technologies sued Apple, Samsung Electronics and Sandisk in eastern Texas federal court, claiming infringement of a portable MP3 player patent that Texas MP3 said it had been assigned. Apple, Samsung, and Sandisk all settled the claims against them in January 2009.
Alcatel-Lucent Alcatel–Lucent S.A. () was a French–American global telecommunications equipment company, headquartered in Boulogne-Billancourt, France. It was formed in 2006 by the merger of France-based Alcatel and U.S.-based Lucent, the latter being a su ...
has asserted several MP3 coding and compression patents, allegedly inherited from AT&T-Bell Labs, in litigation of its own. In November 2006, before the companies' merger, Alcatel sued
Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washi ...
for allegedly infringing seven patents. On 23 February 2007, a San Diego jury awarded
Alcatel-Lucent Alcatel–Lucent S.A. () was a French–American global telecommunications equipment company, headquartered in Boulogne-Billancourt, France. It was formed in 2006 by the merger of France-based Alcatel and U.S.-based Lucent, the latter being a su ...
US $1.52 billion in damages for infringement of two of them. The court subsequently revoked the award, however, finding that one patent had not been infringed and that the other was not owned by
Alcatel-Lucent Alcatel–Lucent S.A. () was a French–American global telecommunications equipment company, headquartered in Boulogne-Billancourt, France. It was formed in 2006 by the merger of France-based Alcatel and U.S.-based Lucent, the latter being a su ...
; it was co-owned by
AT&T AT&T Inc. is an American multinational telecommunications holding company headquartered at Whitacre Tower in Downtown Dallas, Texas. It is the world's largest telecommunications company by revenue and the third largest provider of mobile ...
and Fraunhofer, who had licensed it to
Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washi ...
, the judge ruled. That defense judgment was upheld on appeal in 2008. See Alcatel-Lucent v. Microsoft for more information.


Alternative technologies

Other lossy formats exist. Among these,
Advanced Audio Coding Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) is an audio coding standard for lossy digital audio compression. Designed to be the successor of the MP3 format, AAC generally achieves higher sound quality than MP3 encoders at the same bit rate. AAC has been stan ...
(AAC) is the most widely used, and was designed to be the successor to MP3. There also exist other lossy formats such as mp3PRO and MP2. They are members of the same technological family as MP3 and depend on roughly similar psychoacoustic models and MDCT algorithms. Whereas MP3 uses a hybrid coding approach that is part MDCT and part FFT, AAC is purely MDCT, significantly improving compression efficiency. Many of the basic
patent A patent is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the legal right to exclude others from making, using, or selling an invention for a limited period of time in exchange for publishing an enabling disclosure of the invention."A ...
s underlying these formats are held by
Fraunhofer Society The Fraunhofer Society (german: Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der angewandten Forschung e.V., lit=Fraunhofer Society for the Advancement of Applied Research) is a German research organization with 76institutes spread throughout Germany ...
, Alcatel-Lucent,
Thomson Consumer Electronics Vantiva SA, formerly Technicolor SA, Thomson SARL, and Thomson Multimedia, is a French multinational corporation that provides creative services and technology products for the communication, media and entertainment industries. Vantiva's headq ...
,
Bell A bell is a directly struck idiophone percussion instrument. Most bells have the shape of a hollow cup that when struck vibrates in a single strong strike tone, with its sides forming an efficient resonator. The strike may be made by an inte ...
,
Dolby Dolby Laboratories, Inc. (often shortened to Dolby Labs and known simply as Dolby) is an American company specializing in audio noise reduction, audio encoding/compression, spatial audio, and HDR imaging. Dolby licenses its technologies to ...
,
LG Electronics LG Electronics Inc. () is a South Korean multinational electronics company headquartered in Yeouido-dong, Seoul, South Korea. LG Electronics is a part of LG Corporation, the fourth largest '' chaebol'' in South Korea, and often considered ...
,
NEC is a Japanese multinational information technology and electronics corporation, headquartered in Minato, Tokyo. The company was known as the Nippon Electric Company, Limited, before rebranding in 1983 as NEC. It provides IT and network soluti ...
, NTT Docomo,
Panasonic formerly between 1935 and 2008 and the first incarnation of between 2008 and 2022, is a major Japanese multinational conglomerate corporation, headquartered in Kadoma, Osaka. It was founded by Kōnosuke Matsushita in 1918 as a lightbulb ...
,
Sony Corporation , commonly stylized as SONY, is a Japanese multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Minato, Tokyo, Japan. As a major technology company, it operates as one of the world's largest manufacturers of consumer and professional ...
,
ETRI The Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute () is a Korean government-funded research institution in Daedeok Science Town in Daejeon, Republic of Korea. Overview Established in 1976, ETRI is a non-profit government-funded research ...
, JVC Kenwood,
Philips Koninklijke Philips N.V. (), commonly shortened to Philips, is a Dutch multinational conglomerate corporation that was founded in Eindhoven in 1891. Since 1997, it has been mostly headquartered in Amsterdam, though the Benelux headquarters is ...
,
Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washi ...
, and NTT. When the digital audio player market was taking off, MP3 was widely adopted as the standard hence the popular name "MP3 player". Sony was an exception and used their own
ATRAC Adaptive Transform Acoustic Coding (ATRAC) is a family of proprietary audio compression algorithms developed by Sony. MiniDisc was the first commercial product to incorporate ATRAC in 1992. ATRAC allowed a relatively small disc like MiniDisc to h ...
codec taken from their
MiniDisc MiniDisc (MD) is an erasable magneto-optical disc-based data storage format offering a capacity of 60, 74, and later, 80 minutes of digitized audio. Sony announced the MiniDisc in September 1992 and released it in November of that year fo ...
format, which Sony claimed was better. Following criticism and lower than expected
Walkman Walkman, stylised as , is a brand of portable audio players manufactured and marketed by Japanese technology company Sony since 1979. The original Walkman was a portable cassette player and its popularity made "walkman" an unofficial term for p ...
sales, in 2004 Sony for the first time introduced native MP3 support to its Walkman players. There are also open compression formats like Opus and
Vorbis Vorbis is a free and open-source software project headed by the Xiph.Org Foundation. The project produces an audio coding format and software reference encoder/decoder ( codec) for lossy audio compression. Vorbis is most commonly used in con ...
that are available free of charge and without any known patent restrictions. Some of the newer audio compression formats, such as AAC, WMA Pro and Vorbis, are free of some limitations inherent to the MP3 format that cannot be overcome by any MP3 encoder. Besides lossy compression methods, lossless formats are a significant alternative to MP3 because they provide unaltered audio content, though with an increased file size compared to lossy compression. Lossless formats include
FLAC FLAC (; Free Lossless Audio Codec) is an audio coding format for lossless compression of digital audio, developed by the Xiph.Org Foundation, and is also the name of the free software project producing the FLAC tools, the reference softwa ...
(Free Lossless Audio Codec), Apple Lossless and many others.


See also

*
Advanced Audio Coding Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) is an audio coding standard for lossy digital audio compression. Designed to be the successor of the MP3 format, AAC generally achieves higher sound quality than MP3 encoders at the same bit rate. AAC has been stan ...
(AAC) * AIMP * Audio coding format *
Audio Data Compression In information theory, data compression, source coding, or bit-rate reduction is the process of encoding information using fewer bits than the original representation. Any particular compression is either lossy or lossless. Lossless compressi ...
*
Comparison of audio coding formats The following tables compare general and technical information for a variety of audio coding formats. For listening tests comparing the perceived audio quality of audio formats and codecs, see the article Codec listening test. General informati ...
*
FLAC FLAC (; Free Lossless Audio Codec) is an audio coding format for lossless compression of digital audio, developed by the Xiph.Org Foundation, and is also the name of the free software project producing the FLAC tools, the reference softwa ...
* Fraunhofer FDK AAC *
Fraunhofer Society The Fraunhofer Society (german: Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der angewandten Forschung e.V., lit=Fraunhofer Society for the Advancement of Applied Research) is a German research organization with 76institutes spread throughout Germany ...
* Harald Popp * High-Efficiency Advanced Audio Coding (HE-AAC) * ID3 *
iPod The iPod is a discontinued series of portable media players and multi-purpose mobile devices designed and marketed by Apple Inc. The first version was released on October 23, 2001, about months after the Macintosh version of iTunes wa ...
*
Lossless compression Lossless compression is a class of data compression that allows the original data to be perfectly reconstructed from the compressed data with no loss of information. Lossless compression is possible because most real-world data exhibits statisti ...
*
Lossy compression In information technology, lossy compression or irreversible compression is the class of data compression methods that uses inexact approximations and partial data discarding to represent the content. These techniques are used to reduce data si ...
*
Media player software Media player software is a type of application software for playing multimedia computer files like audio and video files. Media players commonly display standard media control icons known from physical devices such as tape recorders and CD play ...
* Monkey's Audio (APE) * MP3 blog *
MP3 player A portable media player (PMP) (also including the related digital audio player (DAP)) is a portable consumer electronics device capable of storing and playing digital media such as audio, images, and video files. The data is typically stored ...
* MP3 Surround *
MP3HD MPEG-1 Audio Layer III HD more commonly known and advertised by its abbreviation mp3HD is an audio compression codec developed by Technicolor formerly known as Thomson. It achieves lossless data compression, and is backwards compatible with the M ...
* MPEG-1 Audio Layer II (MP2) * MPEG-4 Part 14 * Musepack (MPC) * Opus *
Podcast A podcast is a program made available in digital format for download over the Internet. For example, an episodic series of digital audio or video files that a user can download to a personal device to listen to at a time of their choosin ...
*
Portable media player A portable media player (PMP) (also including the related digital audio player (DAP)) is a portable consumer electronics device capable of storing and playing digital media such as audio, images, and video files. The data is typically stored o ...
* Speech coding * TwinVQ * Unified Speech and Audio Coding (xHE-AAC) *
Vorbis Vorbis is a free and open-source software project headed by the Xiph.Org Foundation. The project produces an audio coding format and software reference encoder/decoder ( codec) for lossy audio compression. Vorbis is most commonly used in con ...
(OGG) * WavPack (WV) *
Winamp Winamp is a media player for Microsoft Windows originally developed by Justin Frankel and Dmitry Boldyrev by their company Nullsoft, which they later sold to AOL in 1999 for $80 million. It was then acquired by Radionomy in 2014. Since ve ...
*
Windows Media Audio Windows Media Audio (WMA) is a series of audio codecs and their corresponding audio coding formats developed by Microsoft. It is a proprietary technology that forms part of the Windows Media framework. WMA consists of four distinct codecs. The ...
(WMA)


References


Further reading

*


External links

*
MP3-history.com
The Story of MP3: How MP3 was invented, by Fraunhofer IIS

, Over 1000 articles from 1999 to 2011 focused on MP3 and digital audio
MPEG.chiariglione.org
MPEG Official Web site {{Authority control Computer-related introductions in 1993 Audio codecs Data compression MPEG Technicolor SA