The MP3 Player Connection

"The Name

MPEG is the acronym for Moving Picture Experts Group. This group has developed compression systems used for video data. For example, DVD movies, HDTV broadcasts and DSS satellite systems use MPEG compression to fit video and movie data into smaller spaces. The MPEG compression system includes a subsystem to compress sound, called MPEG audio Layer-3. We know it by its abbreviation, MP3."¹

http://www.howstuffworks.com/mp3.htm/printable

MP3 players make data storage so much more efficient in both time management and space! The data stored on a CD, "uses an uncompressed, high-resolution format."¹

For each second of music, a CD keeps a lot of bits, and based on the the average length of a song being about three minutes, "[that] average song on a CD consumes about 32 million bytes of space."¹

Being that downloading onto a CD is such a time consuming process, MP3 players work to alleviate this problem. The MP3 [compression] format "[compresses] a CD-quality song . . . without noticeably affecting the CD-quality sound."¹ This high-speed system of the MP3 player allows people to "download songs in minutes rather than hours, and store hundreds of songs on your computer's hard disk without taking up that much space."² The compression doesn't hurt the sound quality either, because "a technique called perceptual noise shaping is used . . . [which utilizes] characteristics of the human ear to design the compression algorithm."² By downsizing the amount of bytes needed to store per song and using compression, you can save significant amounts of space by using an MP3 player.

http://www.howstuffworks.com/mp3.htm/printable

Music for MP3 players can be shared and downloaded practically anywhere nowadays, via the accessibility of the Internet!

How to access MP3 files and use them!

"Download an MP3 file from a Web site and play it
Rip a song from a music CD and play it directly or encode it as an MP3 file
Record a song yourself, convert it to an MP3 file and make it available to the world
Convert MP3 files into CD files and create your own audio CDs from MP3 files on the Web
Rip songs off of various music CDs and recombine them into your own custom CDs
Store hundreds of MP3 files on data CDs
Load MP3 files into tiny portable players and listen to them wherever you go"³

There are many available sites to get music from on the internet, and you can even transfer music onto an MP3 player from your own CDs!

Sources

*¹. http://computer.howstuffworks.com/mp3.htm/printable. Page 2.

*². http://computer.howstuffworks.com/mp3.htm/printable. Page 3.

*³. http://computer.howstuffworks.com/mp3.htm/printable. Page 4.

Music Specialist

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