MP3s have become so ubiquitous that we often forget it’s a compression format. When music gets trimmed to one-tenth of its original size, lots of information deemed “unimportant” gets tossed out. Here ...

OK, recently I did a Divx rip of Spy Game, and decided to try something a bit different with the sound. Normally I compress the soundtrack to MP3 while muxing it with Virtual Dub or NanDub.

If you’re listening to music right now, you can probably hear the vocalist’s slight pitch-shifts, or hiss of a drummer’s hi-hats, or the padded thump of a synth bed. But do you ever think about what ...

Some music/audio is more sensitive to MP3 compression algorithms than others, and in any case it is possible to encode (or re-encode) a poor source at a high bit rate and still end up with crap.

SAN MATEO, Calif. — MP3Pro music compression got a boost this week when Texas Instruments Inc. and STMicroelectronics each announcing hardware support for the format. The new audio coding technology ...

First developed almost three decades ago, the MP3 format made large digital audio files relatively small and easy to pass across an internet that was largely accessed via a very slow (by today’s ...

Whether or not you can actually hear the difference between a high-quality MP3 file and a lossless version of the same song is the subject of much audiophile debate. But there’s no question that no ...