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MP3 is a near-CD quality file format for
sound files, and is very popular for music on the web. It's becoming more
popular as people use it to swap music online because of its powerful
compression. For example, you can get hundreds of songs on a single CD using
the MP3 format. It is a revolutionary digital audio format
developed by Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft and Thompson Multimedia in the late
1980s and brought to the mainstream through the Internet in 1997. MP3 is
short for MPEG (Moving Pictures Experts Group) Layer - 1 , the group that
help make MP3 an international standard. In the first half of 1995 through the late
1990s, MP3 files began to spread on the Internet. MP3's popularity began to
rise rapidly with the advent of Nullsoft's audio player Winamp (released in
1997), the Unix audio player mpg123 and the peer-to-peer file sharing network
Napster (released in 1999). These programs made it simple for average users
to play back, create, share and collect MP3s. The small size of MP3 files has enabled
widespread peer-to-peer file sharing of music which would previously have
been impossible. The major record companies, who argue that such free sharing
of music reduces sales, reacted to this by pursuing law-suits against
Napster, which was eventually closed down, and eventually against individual
users who engaged in file sharing. Despite the popularity of MP3, online music
retailers often use other proprietary formats which are encrypted (known as
Digital Rights Management) to prevent users from using purchased music in
ways not specifically authorised by the record companies. The record
companies argue that this is necessary to prevent the files from being made
available on peer-to-peer file sharing networks. However, this has other side
effects such as preventing users from playing back their purchased music on
different types of devices. Some services, such as eMusic, continue to offer
the MP3 format which allows users to playback their music on virtually any
device. |
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