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MP3

MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3, more commonly referred to as MP3, is a popular digital audio encoding format. It uses a lossy compression algorithm that is designed to greatly reduce the amount of data required to represent the audio recording, yet still sound like a faithful reproduction of the original uncompressed audio to most listeners (above 128kbps). Although people tend to think it's free because it is gratis, MP3 is a proprietary standard that was invented by a team of European engineers of Philips, CCETT, IRT and Fraunhofer Society. These patent issue significantly slowed the development of unlicensed MP3 software and led to increased focus on popularizing an alternative like the Ogg Vorbis, created by Xiph.org, with a higher quality standard.