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''For the video games, see [[Mario Party|Mario Party 3]] and [[Metroid Prime|Metroid Prime 3: Corruption]].''
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Okay, enough buildup. We're here to discuss how it works.
First, MP3, more than a simple audio format, is a ''[[Techno Babble|lossy, frequency-domain, quantized audio compression algorithm]].'' The name is short for ''MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3'', where MPEG is a group of companies developing these sorts of audio and video compression methods. In English: MP3 is a list of step by step instructions that can be followed by a computer program (algorithm) that takes an uncompressed audio file, typically of the same format used in an audio CD, cuts the waveform into about 40 split-second snippets for each second, calculates the frequency components of each snippet (the frequency domain), uses these components to remove part of the information contained in the sequence (some information is lost in the
However, there's one difference between MP3 and the other formats of the day: the part that removes information from the sound sequence was specially designed to remove only the sounds your ear and mind can't hear. This is due to something known as ''psychoacoustics''. Basically, this means we don't hear the same wave that comes out of an audio source: our ear is much more sensitive to medium sounds than it is to bass and treble sounds, and our mind subconsciously filters out the background noise and amplifies the ones we want to hear. This is why you can't seem to hear anything when you record a video in a classroom: your mind filters out the classroom's chatter and lets you focus on your friend's voice, but the microphone can't do this, and just picks up all the environmental sound. MPEG-1 audio layer 2 (MP2) already had a psychoacoustic model, but
So, to continue the [[Overly Long Gag|analogy]] started on their pages: if a [[MIDI]] file is just sheet music, a [[Wav Audio|WAV file]] is an entire orchestra, an
Based on this fact, this is one of the main reasons why the MP3 format became so popular: thanks to its psychoacoustic model, you can strip a ''lot'' of information from the audio, and yet it still sounds pretty much the same as the original source. As a result, a medium-quality song encoded in MP3 format takes up very little
There are many other compression formats out there, some of them born out of legal conflicts between patents and free/open-source software (like Vorbis), some of them actually better (like AAC and Vorbis and Opus), some of them lossless (like FLAC; no information is lost, quality is nigh-perfect, but the files are large), but for now, MP3 is the most popular audio format in the world. However, FLAC is highly trending right now because finally PMPs are able to give a decent FLAC playback.
Interesting note - the original testing of the
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