The MP3 player was launched in the year 1990, which is related to as a high quality digital file format for storage of songs. MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3, most commonly referred to as MP3, is a popular digital audio encoding and lossy compressed format, designed to greatly to reduce the amount of data required to represent audio, yet still sound like a faithful reproduction of the original uncompressed audio to most listeners. MP3 is an audio-specific format that was designed by the Moving Picture Experts Group as part of its MPEG-1 standard. The group was formed by several teams of engineers at Fraunhofer IIS, AT&T-Bell Labs, Thomson-Brandt, CCETT, and others. It was approved as an ISO/IEC standard in 1991. It makes any music file smaller with little or no loss of sound quality. Mp3 Compression scheme is used to transfer audio files via the Internet and store in portable players and digital audio servers, and MP3 is a format for storing and transmitting sound. MP3 formatted sound is usually dealt with a file that can be saved on a computer disk or stored in the memory of a portable MP3 player. These MP3 files are much like document and spreadsheet files in which the individual needs additional software to actually use them. The MP3 format has two key features that make it very exciting: it compresses the audio so as to take up much less disk space. The big deal about MP3 is that it lets you store music in a way that takes up much less disk space than other typical formats, such as WAV files. In fact, MP3 can squeeze audio into less than one-tenth the space it normally takes up on a CD. MP3 files began to spread on the Internet. The popularity of MP3s began to rise rapidly with the advent of Nullsoft's audio player, Winamp. The small size of MP3 files enabled widespread peer-to-peer file sharing of music ripped from CDs, which would have previously been nearly impossible. The first large peer-to-peer file sharing network, Napster, was launched in 1999. |