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MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3, more commonly referred to as MP3, is a digital audio encoding format using a form of lossy data compression. It is a common audio format for consumer audio storage, as well as a de facto standard encoding for the transfer and playback of music on digital audio players.

MP3 is an audio-specific format that was designed by the Moving Picture Experts Group. The group was formed by several teams of engineers at Fraunhofer IIS in Erlangen, Germany, AT&T-Bell Labs in Murray Hill, NJ, USA, Thomson-Brandt, and CCETT as well as others. It was approved as an ISO/IEC standard in 1991. The use in MP3 of a lossy compression algorithm is designed to greatly reduce the amount of data required to represent the audio recording and still sound like a faithful reproduction of the original uncompressed audio for most listeners, but is not considered high fidelity audio by audiophiles.

An MP3 file that is created using the mid-range bit rate setting of 128 kbit/s will result in a file that is typically about 1/10th the size of the CD file created from the original audio source. An MP3 file can also be constructed at higher or lower bit rates, with higher or lower resulting quality. The compression works by reducing accuracy of certain parts of sound that are deemed beyond the auditory resolution ability of most people.

Related MP3 Codecs

Monkey's Audio - A fast and easy way to compress digital music.
Lossless Audio (La) - a Lossless Audio compression codec.
Media Player Codec Pack - The package is designed to be free of conflicts between codecs/filters/splitters and uses Windows Media Player, removing the need to add a different player.
K-Lite Codec Pack 64-bit
Matroska Pack Full
VoxWare MetaSound Audio CoDec
Sharp G.726 Audio Codec
MediaCoder
Mp3tag
WavPack