MP3 - MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III

Format introduction:

MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III, more commonly referred to as MP3, is an audio coding format for digital audio which uses a form of lossy data compression. It is a common audio format for consumer audio streaming or storage, as well as a de facto standard of digital audio compression for the transfer and playback of music on most digital audio players.

Technical details:

The use of lossy compression is designed to greatly reduce the amount of data required to represent the audio recording and still sound like a faithful reproduction of the original uncompressed audio. An MP3 file that is created using the setting of 128 kbit/s will result in a file that is about 1/11 the size of the CD file created from the original audio source.

 

File extension	.mp3
MIME	audio/mpeg, audio/MPA, audio/mpa-robust
Developed by	Fraunhofer Institute
Type of format	Digital audio
Associated programs	VLC media player, MPlayer, Winamp, foobar2000.
Sample file	sample.mp3
Wiki	MP3 on Wikipedia