Sunday, February 24, 2013

The History of MP3 Download

By Patricia F. Wallace


The moving pictures expert group or MPEG is a group of experts that designed an audio-specific format to be a part of their MPEG-1 and named it MP3. Their MPEG-1 standard was then extended to MPEG-2 standard, thus MP3 stands for MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III. It is a common format for audio storage and uses lossy data compression. It is mainly used for consumer's music transfer and playback especially for digital audio players.

The advantage of MP3 is it has small sizes of data but has the ability to produce original uncompressed audio through its algorithm. Through this method, it can prioritize audible parts of the music and reduce lower frequency sounds that human ears don't normally hear.

It was only on the late 1994 that MP3 was introduced to the public and has widely spread over the internet. With the creation of new MP3 audio players, thousands of MP3's had been offered for free on many websites. Due to its small size, MP3 had finally allowed file sharing among music lovers as well as CD ripping.

The world's rapid MP3 downloads had caused some problems. Copyright infringement had brought the term "music piracy" into the public. Decreased in the sales of labels had caused an alarm among some record companies because of MP3 sharing.

Encryption of MP3's available online using proprietary formats had been the solution to this global problem. This is the way that retailers can ensure that music files can't be used other ways than what they specified. Thus, sharing between peers and global availability of files can be prevented.

The "Digital Rights Management" of record companies had lead consumers to begin encrypting and converting MP3's to other formats that will make them widely available. Converting and decrypting audio files will allow them to play files on other devices and share them with their peers.

Because of the wide acceptance and download streams, organizations and companies have fought over for the license and patenting of MP3's. A lot of claims had been submitted that had lead to legal threats and actions against company owners. As a result, licensing of MP3 patents had led to further uncertainty on which products should be licensed.

New formats have been developed that have the same MP3 technology due to the MP3's worldwide success. MP3 downloads is still the leading source of global audio music despite availability of alternatives.




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