MP3 Mpeg Layer Audio 3 - added 2/10/2000

My first experience with mp3s was back in 1996 or 97, sometime then. Back then it wasn't popular, if at all, no one knew about it, there weren't any easy to use rippers or encoders, all of them were console based. Winamp however was already released then. Today mp3 is the buzzword among all Internet users and music lovers. Just by typing mp3 at any search engine alone would yield thousands of search results.
This page is about mp3s, and what is an mp3, in layman terms, and what I know about mp3s.

What is it An mp3 is a highly compressed audio file. It is a lossy codec, which means audio quality is lost from the original sound. It still sounds good though, because the high frequencies of the audio which we cannot hear, are removed. Typically a CD quality mp3 would be 128kbps. Compared to a typical wave file, an mp3 occupies 11 times less space. That is, a 4 minute CD quality wave file would occupy 44 megabytes, and the same mp3 file would occupy only 4 megabytes. You can understand why it's so popular. An average mp3 can be downloaded from the net under 15 minutes with a standard modem connection.
Mps require a lot of processing power, typically only Pentium 100s and above, because the audio is decoded real time. An mp3 player does that. You can find out how much resources an mp3 player consumes just to play an mp3 by going to the Performance tab of System Resources under Control Panel. Compare the percentage of resources before, and while you play an mp3.

Making an mp3 You can create your own mp3s in two ways, by using an mp3 ripper, such as MusicMatch jukebox or by making it yourself. Using an mp3 ripper is easier, all you have to do is startup the software, pick a cd track to rip, select a few options and you're ready to go. Using the traditional method though, one would first have to convert the audio to a .WAV file, and then encoding the wave audio stream to an mp3.

Creating a music cd You can create your own customized music cd if you have a cd writer. How do you do that? Again you can use either MusicMatch jukebox, which is the easiest to use in my opinion, which does all the decoding of mp3s for you. The traditional method would be to convert the mp3s to .WAV files. For example Winamp has an output waveOut plug in which writes the mp3 to disk in .WAV format instead of playing it through the speakers. Once the wave files are created, you can then pass them through a CD recording software to create the audio cd.