Yesterday
MP3 is an abbreviation of MPEG-1 Layer-3, an encoding standard used to compress audio files to one-tenth their normal size, while maintaining almost identical sound quality to the original. For example, a full CD's worth of uncompressed music on your PC would occupy approximately 650 M of your hard drive. Those same files converted to MP3 files would take around 65 M, and play back with little deterioration.

The history of MP3 is related to the development of the CD-ROM. In 1988, the Moving Pictures Experts Group (MPEG) formed a committee to mandate standards of algorithms that could compress a video signal and then play it back off a CD-ROM or over telephone lines. Compression was necessary because the CD-ROM did not have the storage capacity for raw video and audio files. The group hoped to achieve full-motion, full screen, video from a variety of sources which would be similar to VHS in quality. This standard would not be professional ‘broadcast quality’, but would be good enough to display on a computer monitor or consumer multimedia device. This same compression would be applied to audio integrated into video programs.

Enter the Fraunhofer Institute of Munich, Germany who developed three layers of algorithms for compressing CD audio, the third achieving the highest rate of data reduction while maintaining much of the quality of the original. The principle was that quieter sounds were ‘masked’ by louder sounds. Their ‘lossy’ compression scheme removed this masked data, reducing file size to about a tenth and making it ideal for CD-ROM. Their algorithm was accepted by MPEG as an audio compression format standard and became known as MPEG-1 Layer-3, and then MP3 for short. (MPEG has continued its work in compression standardization with subsequent developments of MPEG-2, MPEG-3 and MPEG-4. For a more in depth study of the development of MP3 and the work of MPEG visit www.mpeg.org.)

MP3 was an open standard which no one controlled. The impact of this was not felt until the late 90's when the internet left the halls of government and universities and arrived on your desktop. On the internet, where bandwidth was at issue, download times crucial, and audio quality compromised, MP3 was the perfect tool.

And Pandora's box was opened.

For an informative approach to our MP3 review process please read on by
clicking on the subject links.

An Introduction | Our MP3 test procedures | Results and Top Picks

If you would like to jump right in to the player reviews, click on the links below.

Aqeous Player | Audion (new) | Creative PlayCenter | Destiny Media Player
iTunes (new) | Liquid Player Five | MacAST | Mplay Media Player
MusicMatch Jukebox | QuickTime Player Pro | RealPlayer Plus 8 | Sonique Media Player
Sound App PPC (Power PC) | SoundJam MP Plus | UltraPlayer (new) | Winamp
Windows Media Player | WinRip (new) | Yahoo! Media Player