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.

ID3 and other tags

A "tag" is data stored in an MP3 (as well as other formats) which contains metadata such as the title, artist, album, track number or other information about the MP3 file to be added to the file itself.

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The most widespread standard tag formats are currently the ID3 ID3v1 and ID3v2 tags, and the more recent APEv2 tag.

Related Topics:
ID3 - APEv2 tag

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APEv2 was originally developed for the MPC file format (see the APEv2 specification).

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APEv2 can coexist with ID3 tags in the same file, but it can also be used by itself.

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