MP3

2023 Words5 Pages

As most of us know, downloading mp3’s has seemed to be a big computer demand over these past couple of years. Typical college students around the United States would spend hours downloading files to their computer that would just contain their favorite songs they listen to daily. But why are these students wasting their time and their Internet use downloading simple songs they could find on CD’s? Well the main idea here is that most of the mp3’s that people download off the Internet are free. You do not have a fee to pay when you download this music. Also, here is the first chance ever where people are able to download their favorite music without taking up that much space on their computer.
Background of an MP3
But what exactly is an mp3. Well an mp3 is a compression form (like .zip). The name mp3 stands for Mpeg 1 Audio Layer 3 and its compression algorithm is based on a very complicated model (“MP3 Info”). This model was developed based on the fact that the human ear cannot hear all audio frequencies. Every hearing range for humans is between 20 Hz to 20Khz, and the human ear is most sensitive between 2 to 4 kHz. So, what this mp3 model tried to do was eliminate the frequencies, which the human ear is unable to hear, keeping all the hearing frequencies so everyone will get the hearing experience intact.
This great frequency experience will come from the great mp3 compression. Because of mp3 compression, the form is considered destructive (“MP3 Info”). Destructive means that the compression algorithm causes the file to lose some of its information so that it cannot be restored to its original content. With compressing the audio file, you would use the mp3 algorithm so you could set the encoding level, which would allow any compression level you desire.
Why would you compress audio? Well there is a simple reason to compress digital audio. High quality uncompressed digital audio takes a lot of space (“MP3 Info”). One minute of CD quality uncompressed audio takes around 10 MB of space and would need about 50 minutes to be transferred over a 28.8 modem. So now digital audio tries to compress digital audio so it would take up less space on a person’s computer and have better quality. The larger the compressed file the better the audio quality of the result (“MP3 Info”). ...

... middle of paper ...

... Plus with all the lawsuits this has caused an mp3 software corporation like Napster, soon they will be shut down and now for us students, finding mp3’s will be harder than ever to download. We will be forced to pay for copyrighted music just like we should have all along.

Bibliography Page
Bowman, Lisa (2000). Metallica’s Napster Hit: “Enter Lawman”. Retrieved April
22, 2000 from the World Wide Web: http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,2543398,00.html
Doan, Amy (2000). Napster Embroiled in Music Industry Furor, Faces Lawsuits.
Retrieved April 22, 2000 from the World Wide Web: http://biz.yahoo.com/fo/000420/mu2599.html Jones, Christopher (1999). Battling the Free Music Movement. Retrieved April 22, 2000
From the World Wide Web: http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,32919,00.html MP3 Info. Retrieved April 22, 2000 from the World Wide Web: http://www.mp3now.com/ Nomad World digital audio resources: A Brief History of MP3 – The MP3 Timeline.
Retrieved April 22, 2000 from the World Wide Web: http://www.nomadworld.com/digital-audio-resources/history/

More about MP3

Open Document