What is a MP3 file?
MP3 — universal compressed audio
What is it?
MP3 compresses sound by discarding what the ear can't actually hear. The principle is called psychoacoustic masking: a loud sound hides a fainter one nearby in frequency, and the brain never registers the quieter one. So there's no point storing it.
This selective discarding cuts file size to a tenth of a CD's, without an obvious drop in perceived quality. It's a lossy format: whatever gets thrown away is gone for good.
History & origin
MP3 was developed in the late 1980s by the German Fraunhofer Institute, under the direction of Karlheinz Brandenburg, and standardized in 1993 as layer 3 of MPEG-1.
It upended the music industry: it's the format that made file sharing, portable digital players, and, indirectly, everything that followed possible. Its last patents expired in 2017 — it's now entirely free to use.
Why it is useful
Universal compatibility: no device on earth refuses to play an MP3, from the oldest car stereo to the latest smart speaker.
Small file size with an adjustable bitrate, from 128 kbit/s for everyday listening up to 320 kbit/s, where the difference from the original becomes hard to detect.
Limits & drawbacks
The loss is permanent and cumulative: re-encoding an MP3 as another MP3 degrades it a little more each time.
At low bitrates, cymbals and high-pitched voices start to sound hissy. It also has no support for multichannel audio or richer metadata.
Practical tips
MP3 remains the go-to format for sharing music or listening on the move. Aim for 192 or 256 kbit/s: beyond that, the gain becomes inaudible to most ears and most equipment anyway.
Never archive your music library in MP3: keep the original FLAC or WAV files, and only export to MP3 when you actually need to use them.
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