This report is about the Music format which is a present taking the computer and music industry by storm. The format Is known as Mpeg1 Audio Layer 3 and is shortened to MP3.

The report deals with some of the aspects of the format including:

What is MP3?, Software, hardware, storage, portability and what the future holds in store for MP3.

This report is aimed at those who do not know about MP3 and those who think they know. It will help you to understand what MP3 is about and where it may lead to.

This should be an informative read to anyone who has an interest in computers, music, and innovation.

I hope you enjoy this report and understand it’s contents.

MP3 is a compression form (like .zip) used for compressing songs to 1 tenth their original size. It does this by the use of an ingenious form of compression. The name of this compression form is MP3. *It stands for Mpeg 1 Audio Layer 3 and its compression algorithm is based on a complicated psycho -acoustic model. This model is based on the fact that the human ear cannot hear all the audio frequencies. The human hearing range is between 20Hz to 20Khz and it is most sensitive between 2 to 4 kHz. This MP3 model among other techniques tries to eliminate the frequencies which the human ear is unable to hear, keeping all the frequencies the human ear can hear leaving intact the hearing experience.*

As a result the MP3 compression form is destructive. That means that the compression algorithm causes the file to lose some information so that it cannot be restored to its original content.

When compressing an audio file (encoding) using the MP3 algorithm you can set the desired encoding level and have any compression level you want. The larger the compressed file the better the audio quality of the result. The majority of the files available on the Internet are encoded in 128 kbits stereo 44khz which results to a high quality file that is 10 times smaller than the original. This of course has many interesting consequences.

MP3 is legal if the song's copyright holder has granted permission to download and play the song other wise you are in breach of international copyright laws* . MP3 is simply a file format. However, it can be used either legally or illegally. Using it is legal to make copies from your own CD collection for your personal use* . However, it is illegal to encode MP3s from CD and trade them with your friends without permission from the copyright holder* . This illegal distribution is hard to combat just as it is hard to stop all the people all over the world from copying a CD to a tape and swapping it with friends

* This is the legal outcome of a court case involving Diamond multi media and the American Music Rights Organisation.

Every thing needed to copy, encode and play MP3 files is available on the Internet for free or for a price. There’s plenty of web sites set-up to help people find software and music available for download on the Internet. Here are some sites to look at:

www.mp3now.com

www.mp3.com

www.diamondmm.com/products/current/rio.cfm

www.kjofol.org

On the web you can also get songs which you can download and then listen to on your player software on your PC or Mac

The following is an extract form an article by Ken Foxe in ‘The Star’ newspaper on 13:02:1999.

"

Music piracy on the Internet is costing the likes of Boyzone and The Corrs nearly £3.7 Billion every year.

As much as the high tech criminals surfing the web are turned out 15% of the entire pop market.

Superstar Irish bands like U2, Boyzone, and The Corrs have been enlisted to help crack down on the multi-million dollar pirate industry."

The above article took up most of the page showing how much the subject of mp3 and piracy has come up in the last few months. This is a short summary of the article.

This pirate industry has led the music industries top 5 record labels to develop, in conjunction with IBM, The Madison Project. It lets people purchase songs from the IBM web site and burn their own CDs. But this has its drawbacks, as it is still costly to get a CD writer, they can cost around £300.

However not all music on the net is illegal. Some up and coming artists use the net as a way of distributing the music in the hope of getting discovered.

One such web site is www.k1m.com/wt/f/wt-songs.html

This is the site of one artist called White Town who had a hit in 1996 with a song called Your Woman. He develops and maintains his own web site and allows his material to be downloaded in such popular formats as wave, realaudio and MP3.

All this is available free of charge for your own personal use.

The belief in giving free music to the people is to entice them to purchase the CD and listen to it when they want. Although MP3 is just as good a quality sound as the CD it cannot give the customer the experience or the pleasure of opening the CD or tape case and playing it for the first time. This is because the MP3 files cannot be given solid form. Due to the fact that they are too big to fit on a floppy and too expensive to get a CD writer to put them on CD. But there is a new way of transporting and saving MP3 Files.

At the moment the hardware associated with MP3 is hard to come by. There is so little of it available yet, but the are plenty of products going in to production. Some of the few products available now are a portable MP3 player called the Rio and flash memory

Developed by Diamond Multimedia.

The Rio PMP300 Portable Music Player is now available

to purchase over the Internet at www.diamondmm.com

Rio is an incredibly hot product it puts Internet music in the palm of your hand.

You can mix your own music and take it wherever you go. The Rio is the portable, lightweight, digital music player for mixing and storing up to sixty minutes of digital-quality music using MP3 compression. It comes with an easy user interface, so transferring and converting files is easy. Smaller than an audiocassette, it has no moving parts and never skips, even during the most extreme movement. You get 12 hours of continuous play with just a single standard AA battery or up to twice as long with a lithium battery. Add-on removable flash memory cards give you extra hours of music storage.

There are some limitations to the Rio, for instance it has no backlight on the LCD display so it can be difficult to use at night. It also does not display the track name just the number of the order it is in i.e. track 1 2 or 3.

These are small complaints as it is the first on the market and is avail at a good price -

$199. Future developments of the product should see this put right.

The following is from the Diamond web site:

To determine how much play time your Rio actually has, use the following equation:

Rio Play Time = M / (S x 0.439)

Where:

M= Rio memory size in MB (32MB, 48MB, etc.)

S= Sampling Speed in kbps (128kbps, 80kbps, etc.)

Thus, a 32MB Rio PMP300 playing 128kbps (CD Quality) music has a playtime capacity of 34 minutes and 8 seconds. Similarly, 64kbps music gives the Rio twice the capacity or 1 hour, 8 minutes and 16 seconds.

www.diamondmm.com

Flash is a type of storage that combines the speed of hard disk technology with the portability of floppy disks, while adding a few new benefits of its own. Flash technology has been around for over a decade, but only in recent years has the price and availability of flash chips combined to make flash cards a viable option for consumers. Much of the popularity of flash cards is due to the explosion of digital cameras and other consumer electronic devices. These small devices require even smaller, removable media to store images, video, sound, and other file formats. Furthermore, the media must feature fast read / write speeds, high tolerance to shock and movement, and use very low power. Hard drives, floppy disks, and other proprietary media do not come close to addressing these requirements. The solution is flash technology

SmartMedia Solid Floppy Disc Card (SSFDC) is the thinnest and smallest type of flash card. It is available in sizes from 2MB to 16MB. These cards are about 1/3 the size of a credit card, and just as thin. SmartMedia uses a single NAND flash EEPROM (electrically erasable programmable read only memory) chip embedded in the plastic to read and write data. The ultra-small size makes SmartMedia an ideal storage card for digital cameras, cellular phones, pagers, and other electronic devices. The SmartMedia data format is based on the ATA and DOS file standard. When used with a SmartMedia adapter, the card can be shared between different applications and systems, such as the Rio and a PC.

Yes, MP3 has a future but it will become just one of the many ways to purchase the music you the consumer want.

MP3 has already caught the interest of the music publishers and it will become the way for up and coming young bands to target an audience and get established before they charge for the right to listen to the music they produce.

As for already established acts who think they are being ripped off they should not worry as the next generation of MP3 will probably be brought more in line with what the music industry wants to use this new format for. The music industry will sell MP3 music files which will contain licence information about the original purchaser’s computer and to copy it would make the copied file destroy it’s self if played on an other computer.

Having considered all this I believe that MP3 and any new version (i.e. the much talked about MP4) of the format will be hard if not impossible to police. So as with so much of today’s CD it will be copied and passed on between friends just as today CDs are copied on tape.

In the last few years CD-R/W has dropped in price so maybe MP3 will not be the worry to the music industry it thinks.

Philips have in the last 6 months introduced a CD recorder which is an add-on to your existing HI-FI system and can copy CDs this costs only £300 now, so in a few years it will come down to the sub £100 mark.

All this leaves you wondering which will win MP3 or CD-R?

My money is on MP3.

Due to its portability, price and when used in conjunction with a portable player, its convenience.

MP3 the way of the future.

MP3 is the new format to listen and get music on the Internet it is widely available and in most cases cost nothing. MP3 stands for Mpeg Audio layer 1 and what is does is compress audio information by a factor of 10.

The way this new format works is by deleting the frequencies over and under the human hearing frequencies. It also uses a lesser quality to compress the frequencies the edge of the human hearing frequencies. This leads to a smaller size of file which at 4-5mb per song they can easily be down loaded from the Internet.

You can get some of today’s hits from the Internet but in most cases this is in breach of copyright laws.

This type of format is all well and good when you are in the same room as the computer but if you want to move about you can’t very well take your computer with you even a laptop is to bulky. Now this problem has been solved by an American company called Diamond multimedia. They have developed a device so small and light it is as small as an audio cassette at the moment it is expansive but when other companies see the potential market the will develop products of there own. All this is good news for the consumer as it will mean a price drop on the portable MP3 players.

Portability is an other big question if the songs are 4-5 Mb in size then the wont fit on a floppy disc and there for can not be transferred to and from computers.