Importance of MP3 (digital music)
Music has always been present in societies around the world, and with the passage of time and technological advances it has been enclosed in very diverse reproduction formats: cassette, LP, CD or Mini-Disc have been some of the means Most popular in which people have brought their favorite music.
Software engineering made it possible for Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) to design a specific audio format with a .MP3 file extension, a name given by the Fraunhofer Society in July 1995. The MP3 digital audio format would become popular from the second half of the last decade of the 90s thanks to the Internet, P2P networks and the commercialization of the first MP3 players (MPMan and Rio PMP300).
The digital audio format MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III (MP3) is the most important of all time, even ahead of WMA, FLAC, OGG or AAC, readable by any electronic media player device: televisions, CD / Blu-ray / DVD players, car radios, portable MP4 and MP3 players, PCs, Tablets, mobile phones, compact audio systems, compact music systems….
MP3 music has had a huge impact on modern, hyper-connected society, and has made it possible for people to carry vast music libraries in as little space as on a micro SD memory card.
MP3 quickly moved to CD-Audio, a format that is only capable of storing music with a standardized maximum of 80 minutes of playback and about 20 tracks per CD: the data CD, with MP3 tracks, is capable of storing about 150 tracks per disk (at the rate of 5MB per track).
MP3, with a maximum audio quality of 320KBps and an acceptable minimum of 128Kbps, would conquer digital music lovers and facilitate the “physical” compaction of music libraries: going from individual 80-minute (700MB) discs to discs hard laptops between 250 and 500GB or 8GB / 16GB USB sticks… managing to store thousands of albums in devices smaller than the size of an Apple iPhone.
MP3 would also change the style of music players, in addition to changing to smaller, more versatile and manageable formats. From rough and large portable CD players to tiny devices like iPod Shuffle.
The change from a CD-Audio unit to integrated physical memories or micro SD would also favor the use of music players in sports activities, thus avoiding skipping between tracks due to movement: the new storage medium would solve the typical deterioration of the units optical, with a tendency to scratch in more or less careless use.
MP3 music would dramatically reduce file size, going from around 50MB on CD-Audio tracks (.wav files on PCs) to 5MB or less on MPEG-2 Audio Layer III (depending on encoding quality): It would favor sending tracks by email, sharing them through P2P networks (.torrent), bluetooth or their storage in the cloud (DropBox, BOX…).
The MP3 music format is preferred by the general public, ahead of others such as OGG, FLAC, WMA or AAC: greater diffusion, and better compatibility of the format with consumer electronics devices.
MP3 has also contributed to greater accessibility of music content, its organization on digital devices, management and copying of tracks on computers and mobile devices, and editing of the information attached to each track.
MP3 and its full compatibility in devices commonly used by users has favored legal downloading (online stores, such as iTunes or Amazon) and illegal downloading (download pages and P2P networks).
Thanks to the success of MP3, listening to music on any device with speakers, or to which headphones can be connected, is a simple activity: conventional digital music players (MP4 and / or MP3) are being defeated by Smartphones, with accessible memory of at least 16GB).
MP3 has become the most important and widespread digital audio format of all time.
