Web Design in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition

MP3 (.mp3)

MP3’s explosion in popularity is nothing short of a phenomenon and has changed the way we use and view the Internet. The key to its success is MP3’s ability to maintain excellent sound fidelity at very small file sizes. In fact, its compression scheme can reduce an audio source to just one-tenth of its original size. For instance, four minutes of high-quality music in WAV format requires 40 MB of disk space; as an MP3, the same file weighs in at just 3.5 MB! With the discovery of MP3, it was suddenly feasible to transfer songs over the Internet without prohibitive download times. The rest is history.