How MP3 File Works | MP3 Compression Explained In 3 Minutes

While CD uses an uncompressed, high-resolution format, the goal of MP3 is to compress audio while retaining a sound quality comparable to CD.
Here’s how it works.

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Shout out to MrWafflesNBacon for suggesting this topic!

Some sources & further reading:

[CyrilleBoucanogh]

Thanks. But you didn't actually explained how mp3 works: how it compresses the audio signal and what information we lose.

[ldchappell]

I love mp3s. You can put the entire discography of a group or musician on one disk. I have total catalog disks of the Stones, Pink Floyd, Zeppelin, Rush, Beatles, Creedence,
Queen, Elton John, Nick Cave, Leonard Cohen, Velvet Underground and quite a few more.

[MorrisonProductions]

This is actually pretty helpful, I like the whiteboard style and the bit psychoacoustics. And it all seems accurate. Keep up the good work.

[maalat]

Thanks. I’m a real beginner. It will help if a lot of those words are further explained. Thanks for sharing.

[TheYaq]

we live in a time, were we use things like this daily, but we to dumb to understand how it works

[andriesvantonder]

I like my megabytes, so I like mp3 more.

[bryanmanx]

I remember back in the 90s I got in a fight with my room mate over how digital audio works. he was convinced that it was written with the hard drive the same way analog audio is written to a magnetic tape. I told him that was impossible because hard drives were a collection of 1's and 0's. so to prove him wrong I wrote a command line app that would read a wave header to determine the type of file then I would just step through each sample and draw them onto the screen using the old BASIC pset. if it was mono I would draw one wave, stereo I would draw 2. I had to scale the wave due to resolution so I later it was easy to add a zoom in and out function on the wave. I ruled the day in that argument!!! if anyone wants to see that old code I still have it but its 16 bit so you would need a 16bit dos emulator or a 32 install of windows. I realize it works on wave files but I believe understanding wave files can help you get a grasp on mp3s.

[AirborneSurfer]

Great breakdown on MP3s! I was an early adopter of the format back in the 90s, so my entire collection consists of tens of thousands of tracks at this point--WAY too late to change to FLAC!

[AnhTran-ohlo]

thank you for helping me survive in as level computer science <3

[yungshamploo]

Nice video! I have a question: for example, YouTube streams videos at 128kbps. If I were to convert a YouTube video to MP3 format and download it, would that 128kbps MP3 file be even more compressed since it was converted from video to MP3?

[mohtadibakali]

thanks for your nice tutorial, but you forget to talk about how to convert or mapping an analog datasource to a digital

[mindbenderx]

Lossless at home with audiophyle equipment, but while welding in the shop, 256kbs is fine. I was sensitive to bad mp3s back when downloading from aohell dialup. each 128kbs 4 minute song to 20 minutes, oh, lost connection start over, this was before download mangagers
frounhauffer (however thats spelled) was still a Dos encoder.

[GumbyTheGreen]

You need to fix the title. The video is about the structure of MP3 files, not MP3 *compression*.

[howardgoodman]

I have to see and hear an mp3 to understand what you just said.

[beaistallerthanyou]

POV: you have to watch this for school

[techmundane]

Okay, does mp3 compression make cheap mics sound on par with expensive ones? When ai watch mic comparisons on YouTube, I noticed the difference in a $10 and $100 mic is negligible. Is this because of the mp3 codec?

[Pavel]

Well first of all Nice quick explanation on mp3 ☺.
And as per comment request ON lossy (mp3) and lossless (FLAC) digital music files, I think both serves their purpose according to the situation (mp3 being my favourite since I got most of my music collection in this format, except few which are lossless) . But my preference, for if abundantly storage/space is available why not go with lossless(FLAC), no loss aey😉.

[BojanBojovic]

Over 192 kbps it is imperceivable in most cases, with 320 kbps almost always.
There is a difference that can be heard when you flip a phase, but this is mostly not audible.
I bet no one can hear the difference in a blind test.

[yurimin]

Okay but if I take a video of myself singing and convert it to mp3, does it still open to show my face or does it just become an audio play??

[cookiebinary]

Everything else but not MP3 Compression Explained.