*Source: Ars Technica (
http://arstechnica.com/articles/paed...pression.ars)*
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Since its standardization in 1991, MP3 has gone from being a little-known portion of a video file format to the kind of ubiquity that most brands can only dream of having. It's both widespread, with small players flying off the shelves, and controversial, dropping from the lips of politicians and advocates for all sides of the intellectual property debate.
But what is MP3? The usual explanations usually take one of two forms. The long version, available in technical papers, is written in jargon and filled with math. The short version, often used by newspapers and nontechnical periodicals, simply states that the process eliminates parts of sound not normally heard by the human ear. But this one-sentence description raises more questions than it answers for any reasonably tech-savvy reader: how does it find those unheard sounds, and how does it get rid of them? What's the difference between the different bit rates and quality levels? If you're anything like me, you've often wanted to know the mechanics of MP3, but not to the point of writing your own encoder.
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