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MP3 file format

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MP3 file format

Mp3 file format

Introduction:
MP3 file format

1. Overview:
MP3 files are made up of frames, and frames are the smallest unit of MP3 files. The full name of MP3 must be MPEG1 Layer 3 audio files. MPEG
(Motion Picture Experts Group) translates into Chinese as Moving Picture Experts Group, and refers specifically to moving video and audio compression standards.
MPEG1 standard, also known as MPEG audio layer, which is divided into three layers based on compression quality and encoding complexity, namely,
Layer-1, Layer2 and Layer3, which correspond to the three sound files of MP1, MP2 and MP3 respectively, and use different
levels of audio files according to different purposes. The higher the MPEG audio encoding level, the more complex the encoder and the higher the compression ratio. The compression ratios of MP1 and MP2 are 4:1 and
6:1-8:1 respectively, while the compression ratio of MP3 is as high as 10:1-8:1. 12:1, meaning one minute of CD-quality music requires 10MB
of storage space without compression, but only about 1 MB after MP3 compression encoding. However, MP3 uses a lossy compression method for audio signals. To reduce
sound distortion, MP3 adopts “sensory coding technology”, that is, it first analyzes the frequency spectrum of audio files during encoding, and then uses filters to filter the
noise . levels. Then the remaining bits are spread and arranged by means of quantization, and finally an MP3 file with a higher compression ratio is formed, and the
compressed file can achieve a sound effect closer to the original sound source during playback.
2. The whole structure of
MP3 files: MP3 files are roughly divided into three parts: TAG_V2 (ID3V2), Frame, TAG_V1 (ID3V1)
ID3V2 contains information like author, composer, album, etc. The length is not fixed, which expands the information volume of ID3V1.
A series of frames, the number is determined by the size of the file and the length of the frame. The length of each frame of the
frame
may not be fixed or fixed, and is determined by the bitrate
.
Each table is divided into two parts: table header and data entity Header of data.
frame
Record the bit rate, sample rate, version and other information of mp3, and each frame is independent of each other The frame
ID3V1 contains information like author, composer, album, etc., and the length is 128BYTE . 3. MP3 FRAME format: each FRAME has a FRAMEHEADER frame header, the length is 4BYTE (32 bits), there may be two CRC check bytes after the frame header, the existence of these two bytes depends on the FRAMEHEADER information If bit 16 is 0, there is no checksum after the frame header, and if it is 1, there is a checksum. The checksum length is 2 bytes, followed by the FRAMEHEADER, followed by the frame entity data. The format is as follows: FRAMEHEADER CRC (free) MAIN_DATA 4 BYTE 0 OR 2 BYTE The length is calculated from frame header 1. The format of the FRAMEHEADER frame header is as follows: AAAAAAAA AAABCCD EEEEFFGH IIJJKLMM

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What is the difference between MP3 and lossless sound quality?

Is it possible to distinguish Mp3 quality from CD Quality?

Although the sound quality of a CD does not reach the true hearing limit of the human ear, it is impossible for most people to tell the difference between a CD and a higher sampling rate, so everyone assumes that the CD sound quality is 44.1 kHz can be converted to lossless sound quality.

In the past, the capacity of storage media was not large. To store more music and make it easier to stream, we used to compress large CD audio files. High frequency and low volume sounds are removed to achieve the purpose of reducing file size. Similar formats include 3GP, M4A, AA3, WMA, etc.

With the development of the Internet and storage media, the size of audio files is no longer important, so lossless compression has gradually become popular. Common formats are APE, FLAC, etc., which are similar to the beginning of ZIP compressed files, compress audio files AND packed, the final file size is basically only half of the original CD file. Here it is emphasized that the WAV format we often say is a waveform record file, which uses uncompressed PCM encoding, which is also a relatively large WAV file. 44.1 kHz 16-bit WAV audio can also be considered uncompressed. Lossless sound quality.

Since different devices support different audio compression formats, we often need to transcode, and each transcode will cause some loss in audio. For example: If you convert MP3 to lossless format, you can only achieve the sound quality of the original MP3 file. This lossless can also be called false lossless. This is the case for most lossless music provided by music portals.

I have been recording for many years and have used speakers ranging from tens of thousands to millions of dollars. Why do I rarely use speakers under 10,000 yuan? Because speakers under 10,000 yuan cannot be used as monitors. I advise everyone not to charge money for listening to music on music portals for lossless sound quality. Untrained ears will not be able to hear the difference between true and false without loss. For normal ears, MP3 with a bit rate of 320 kbps is already the best.

What is the difference between MP3 and lossless sound quality?

Now, many people think that it is impossible to listen to MP3, so they search for lossless music everywhere on the Internet.

So what is the difference between lossless music and MP3? What about the various lossless music formats?

A few days ago, a friend of mine bought a Porsche sports car and then came to ask me for lossless sound quality music. I told him there was no need to play MP3s, but people weren’t happy. The sound in the car was fine. Playing MP3 is a loss of audio.

Now there are many music websites that give lossless to the myth, but do you know what lossless is? What is the difference between lossless music and ordinary MP3? Today I come to talk to you about those things that have no losses.

I remember when Apple held the Iphone4 conference, it came up with a definition: retina display. In short, it has been replaced by a high resolution screen with pixels that exceed the recognition limit of the human eye since the Iphone4. I must say that Mr. Qiao’s trick is very good, he defines a word that everyone can accept and makes Apple mobile phones sell all over the world.

However, the same concept is much older in the world of acoustics. Sound is a type of energy wave. After the experimental research of countless generations of ancestors, it is believed that 40 kHz is a value that can well restore the sound heard by the human ear. Later, for various commercial reasons, some record companies defined the sample rate of CDs at 44.1 kHz, which they considered to be the “retina display” that the ears could hear. Later, 44.1 kHz brought innumerable problems to subsequent generations, because it is not an integer and cannot be divided and multiplied simply by performing SRC sampling, so early Inter defined the output sample rate of the sound card as 48 kHz to save problem. , which creates a sample rate conversion problem that all sound engineers hate

The MP3 format changed the music industry

The MP3 format revolutionized the world of music. For better or for worse, this audio coding format made listening to (and sharing) music through the Internet popularized in such a way that the entire industry ended up adopting this or other solutions to end up making the leap to a model in which the physical format yielded prominence to downloads and streaming.

The technology, however, was subject to patents that were defended by Technicolor, but these patents – still in force for encoders, for example – fully expired on April 16, 2017. MP3 is now more free than ever.

Never before, MP3 patents

Those responsible for Fraunhofer IIS explained a few days ago how “on April 23, 2017, the Technicolor mp3 licensing program for certain patents and software of Technicolor and Fraunhofer IIS related to the mp3 has expired.”

Fraun

In that message, thanks to all those who have licensed the technology for their support of a format that became the “defacto audio codec worldwide for the last two decades”, and highlighted that even though there are more efficient audio codecs, mp3 is still “very popular with consumers”. MP3’s success paralleled that of the legendary Winamp, the player that became that symbol of a change of scene in the audio industry.

Those patents have been very beneficial for their owners: it is estimated that thanks to them the Fraunhofer Society achieved an income that reached 100 million euros in 2005. Those amounts of money caused many others to try to take a piece of that juicy cake, and lawsuits and lawsuits regarding who owned what in the MP3 segment have been frequent.

Alternatives exist, but MP3 doesn’t seem to lose strength

The MP3 format (MPEG-1 Layer 3) has arguably been the most popular “lossy” audio format — we lose data in encoding — but it certainly isn’t technically the best. The rise of the format and its deficiencies made in fact that many others tried to develop alternatives with which to conquer the market.

Mp31
Among those codecs is the AAC family of formats, which does not require the payment of licenses to stream or distribute content in that format. Of course, there are patents for the development of AAC codecs, which forces those who implement Open Source software that takes advantage of this format to distribute it only with the code, as in the case of the famous FFMpeg.

This format has become enormously popular, and is used by Apple’s devices and services, but it is also widely used by Google both on its Android platform and on YouTube. Many other products include native support for the reproduction of these contents nowadays, both for being royalty-free and for the improvements in the coding that allow that at similar bitrates the quality of AAC audio tends to be superior to that of MP3s.

Another of the great protagonists is Vorbis, the audio codec that is part of the well-known Ogg Vorbis container and that offers even more advantages in terms of patents or royalties: all its specifications are in the public domain, the libraries are published through a license BSD, while the tools to encode and decode files in this format are licensed under the LGPL.

This format is not as widespread as AAC, but it is still very relevant today and in fact it is used massively on Spotify, the most popular streaming service worldwide today.

These two examples are combined with the presence of a good number of alternatives, both with and without loss, which have been gaining some ground in recent years. None of them, however, has ceased to diminish the relevance of the MP3 format, which remains one of the key options for end users when it comes to enjoying music in digital format.

And if it was previously feasible to do so, the end of patents in full should even further support the use of this codec that, as we said, changed the music industry forever.