BUZZ WORDS

MP3

by Roger Barnette

While known to millions this little TLA (three-letter-acronym) is one of the most popular on the internet. Search engines rank it above most keywords for adult content and yet is little understood by the people that use it.

Its mostly trivia, but I hope you enjoy this brief treatise.

If you go to the online Dictionary... http://www.dictionary.com/search?q=mp3

You learn that MP3 is short for "MPEG-1, layer 3" which while concise isn't very descriptive.

I also learned that MPEG stood for "Moving Picture Expert Group," or that the people that develop movies worked on it rather than the newspaper people (they worked on the JPEG or JPG standard).

http://www.dictionary.com/search?q=Moving%20Picture%20Experts%20Group

All that is nice to know, but basically MP3 = Music. It's that simple. Overnight, a few software companies developed programs that remove/copy or "rip" the music from Music CDs and create the files that are MP3s. We say, overnight, because suddenly everyone's CD collection could then be made into files and thereby shared with their friends.

The best "ripper" in my opinion is MusicMatch. Its website is http://www.musicmatch.com/

The feature of this file format that has given it nearly heroic notoriety, is the fact that these files were 10% the size of the the original CD tracks, therefore 10 hours, rather than 1 hour could be stored on a CDROM.

I will leave it to the professional journalists to predict the outcome of all the legal battles, but MP3 is here to stay and when used properly will make it easier for all of us to have a more broad selection of music everywhere we go.

If you would like to help learning about MP3s or would like to chat more on this topic, please feel free to send us an email.