This week's topic included "Application Software" and "Multimedia". I love listening to music as this is simply making my day a lot better. Thus I have loads of MP3s on my computer that I can choose from. However, I can still remember the times, when I sat in front of our radio, waiting for the right song to then tape it and have it on my own cassette to be able to play it whenever I want to. Today, I simply go to the iTunes store on the Internet, choose the music I heard in the radio or somewhere else, click on it, purchase and download it and then finally, I have it on my MacBook and can listen to it whenever and wherever I want to. This technology of MP3 is amazing and thus I think it is worth being talked about a bit more.
MP3 stands for "MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3". "MPEG" is simply short for the "Motion Pictures Expert Group", which is a group of people from the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC). Their mission is to "create and publish standards for various areas of technology", where MPEG specifically refers to "standards in audio and video formats used online, in TV broadcasts and DVD media". MP3 is an audio file format that has been compressed and can hence be distributed in smaller-sized files. These MP3 files can be up to 90% smaller than the original files. However, one has to be careful, to not compress the original audio file too much, as this technique is a lossy compression method. It is taking advantage of the "auditory masking" effect, which means that the human hearing system cannot hear certain tones, when other sounds share the same frequency (for example: Think about a jet flying lowly over your head - Can you still hear what the person in front of you is saying?). So, getting rid of these tones that the human ear cannot hear anyways, is the compression method applied by converting audio files into MP3-format. In this sense, for our human hearing system, the MP3 format is lossless, however, if you see it from a technological point of view, it implies loss of certain tones of
your audio file. Consequently, MP3 format is referred to as a lossy compression method. MP3 usually is recorded at very low rates of around 256 kilobits per second, which is about 1/6 of the normal compact disc format using 1.4 megabits per second. This suggests, that MP3 audio files are not only saving a lot of storage space on your computer, iPod and so on, but they are consequently also faster to download, distribute etc.
In conclusion, I think that MP3 format made the life for music-lovers so convenient and comfortable that it is definitely one of the best inventions of the last decades.
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