How does an mp3 work?
Why is an mp3 more compact?
The format known as mp3 was created with the intention of being able to contain the audio that a WAV contained, for example, but occupying much less space.
That is, it is not an audio container variant made for other purposes. It was specifically designed, created and thought to be able to compress an audio that to human ears would sound the same as the original WAV but that by various means would occupy much less space.
Obviously the first tool is zip compression and redundancy compression.
For example, if a piece to be compressed was the following:
00000111110000011111
The mathematical way to compress it (seen from a simplified point of view) would be:
0(5)1(5)0(5)1(5)
That is, five zeros, followed by 6 zeros, followed by 4 zeros and ending with 6 zeros.
It is much easier to decipher it that way and it occupies much less space uew using the zeros and ones.
That is the basic way to save space: looking for a way to express the same thing, but using much fewer signs or elements.
Imagine that the first three seconds are silent:
000000000000000000000000 and so on for 200 zeros. It is easier to write in some way that at the beginning there will be 324 zero numbers.
Later, and we will see this later, the mp3 uses the well-known way in which the human ear captures sound, to decide which elements can be eliminated (for example, frequencies that the human ear cannot distinguish) and thus save more space.
