MP3

MP3 is a popular digital audio encoding and lossy compression format invented and standardised in 1991 by a team of engineers working in the framework of the ISO/IEC MPEG audio committee under the chairmanship of Professor Hans Musmann (University of Hannover - Germany). It was designed to greatly reduce the amount of data required to represent audio, yet still sound like a faithful reproduction of the original uncompressed audio to most listeners. In popular usage, MP3 also refers to files of sound or music recordings stored in the MP3 format on computers.

Decoding of MP3 audio

Decoding, on the other hand, is carefully defined in the standard.

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Most decoders are "bitstream compliant", meaning that the uncompressed output they produce from a given MP3 file will be the same (within a specified degree of rounding tolerance) as the output specified mathematically in the standard document.

Related Topics:
Decoder - Bitstream compliant - Rounding

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The MP3 file has a standard format which is a frame consisting of 576 samples and all the frames have associated header information(32 bits)

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and side information(17 bytes).These informations help the decoder to decode the associated huffman encoded data correctly.

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Therefore, for the most part, comparison of decoders is almost exclusively based on how computationally efficient they are (i.e., how much memory or CPU time they use in the decoding process).

Related Topics:
Memory - CPU time

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