Mp3 A New Technology Essay Research

Mp3 : A New Technology Essay, Research Paper

As most of us know, downloading mp3’s has seemed to be a big computer demand over these past couple of years. Typical college students around the United States would spend hours downloading files to their computer that would just contain their favorite songs they listen to daily. But why are these students wasting their time and their Internet use downloading simple songs they could find on CD’s. Well the main idea here is that most of the mp3’s that people download off the Internet are free. You do not have a fee to pay when you download this music. Also, here is the first chance ever where people are able to download their favorite music without taking up that much space on their computer.

Background of an MP3

But what exactly is an mp3. Well an mp3 is a compression form (like .zip). The name mp3 stands for Mpeg 1 Audio Layer 3 and its compression algorithm is based on a very complicated model (“MP3 Info”). This model was developed based on the fact that the human ear cannot hear all audio frequencies. Every hearing range for humans is between 20 Hz to 20Khz, and the human ear is most sensitive between 2 to 4 kHz. So, what this mp3 model tried to do was eliminate the frequencies, which the human ear is unable to hear, keeping all the hearing frequencies so everyone will get the hearing experience intact.

This great frequency experience will come from the great mp3 compression. Because of mp3 compression, the form is considered destructive (“MP3 Info”). Destructive means that the compression algorithm causes the file to lose some of its information so that it cannot be restored to its original content. With compressing the audio file, you would use the mp3 algorithm so you could set the encoding level, which would allow any compression level you desire.

Why would you compress audio. Well there is a simple reason to compress digital audio. High quality uncompressed digital audio takes a lot of space (“MP3 Info”). One minute of CD quality uncompressed audio takes around 10 MB of space and would need about 50 minutes to be transferred over a 28.8 modem. So now digital audio tries to compress digital audio so it would take up less space on a person’s computer and have better quality. The larger the compressed file the better the audio quality of the result (“MP3 Info”).

Bitrate

Bitrate Quality Kbyte/sec Size

1411 CD 10584 Kbyte/min 41,3 MB

192 Perfect CD quality MP3 1440 Kbyte/min 5,6 MB

160 Perfect CD quality MP3 1200 Kbyte/min 4,7 MB

128 Excellent CD quality MP3 960 Kbyte/min 3,8 MB

112 Near CD quality MP3 840 Kbyte/min 3,3 MB

96 Near CD quality MP3 720 Kbyte/min 2,8 MB

64 FM quality MP3 480 Kbyte/min 1,9 MB

32 AM quality MP3 240 Kbyte/min 0,9 MB

16 Short-wave quality MP3 120 Kbyte/min 0,5 MB

“This large compressing can lead to an mp3 encoded in 128 kbits stereo 44 kHz, also known as a bitrate, which results to a high quality file that is 12 times smaller than the original. A bitrate is a term widely used in audio compression” (“MP3 Info”). It is the average number of bits that one second of audio data will consume. The unit they use is kbps (1000 bits/s). In the following chart, you will be able to see the bitrates of different audio signals. There are two parts of audio compression so that you can get this great stereo sound. The first part is the encoding which transforms the digital audio data into a large compressed file that is coded audio data. Part two is the decoding from the code audio data and it reconstructs the digital audio. This second part is necessary if a person wanted to play this file on their soundcard.

Advantages of MP3’s

With such a great compression into a small file, the mp3 has created some advantages for a person that would like to listen to great digital music on their own personal computer. For example, a person can create a CD’s that have over 160 songs, which can play over 14 hours of music on a computer. A second example is that a person can efficiently store songs on their hard drive and play the songs directly from the hard disk. Finally, a third example is that the best of all, people can now easily transmit a song over the Internet. A compressed four-minute song is smaller 4Mb, while an uncompressed song would be over 40Mb. That is why mp3 has become the hottest thing to download on the Internet the last few months (“The MP3 Timeline”).

How to Play an MP3 File

Now after learning about the background of an mp3, how do you play these files on a computer. The first thing you will need is to check what hardware you will need for playing these files. The minimum requirement for acceptable digital quality is a Pentium 75Mhz processor. If you computer has that hardware requirement, then you will need an mp3 player. You can find many mp3 players on the Internet and computer stores. The most common players that people use on their PC’s are Winamp (located at winamp.com) and Sonique (located at sonique.com). These two players are shown below with the winamp player on the left and the sonique player on the right.

Winamp Sonique

If you have a fast processor and an mp3 player, then you are on your way to enjoy this new age digital music.

Portable Hardware Devices

A portable hardware

Внимание, отключите Adblock

Вы посетили наш сайт со включенным блокировщиком рекламы!
Ссылка для скачивания станет доступной сразу после отключения Adblock!

Скачать