MP3

MP3 stands for MPEG-1 Audio Layer III. It is not a separate format, but a part of MPEG-1 video encoding format, developed by MPEG group in early 1990's. Too often people refer MP3 as MPEG-3, which is incorrect, because such format doesn't even exist.

MPEG-1 Audio Layer III (MP3) is a method to store good quality audio into small files by using psychoacoustics in order to get rid of the data from the audio that most of the humans can't hear.

MP3's bitrates vary from 8kbps (that is 8 kilobits per second, not kilobytes) to 320kbps. When MP3 phenomenom began in 1996, most of the audio files were encoded using 128kbps bitrate, which is still the most popular bitrate in the world -- although most of the people agree that by using slightly higher bitrates, like 192kbps or 256kbps, the audio quality can be compared with the CD quality.

Related software tools:

Absolute MP3 Splitter Converter v2.8.7 (Shareware)
Absolute MP3 Splitter Converter is a powerful audio split, merge and convert software, which can split your large audio file into small pieces and merge audio files in one large file, conver

Apollo MP3 Player 37zz (Freeware)
Very good basic MP3 player with awesome decoding routines. Unfortunately lacks few modern functions, but absolutely worth trying.

Arial CD Ripper v1.9.7 (Adware)
Arial CD Ripper is a versatile and easy to use tool for CD grabbing and audio conversion.It can extract all your favourite CD into MP3 ,WAV, OGG,FLAC,APE

Audacity for Windows v1.3.9 Beta (Open source)
Audacity is a free, open sourced audio editor.

Audio CD Ripper v1.32 (Freeware)
Grab music from audio CD tracks and save them as WAV, WMA, OGG or MP3 files

BeSplit v0.9b6 (Freeware)
BeSplit is a little tool that allows fixing the incorrect headers in AC3 or OGG files as well as cutting various audio formats.

BeSweet v1.5b31 (Freeware)
Ultimate tool for all the audio conversions you ever need in video editing.

BeSweetGUI v0.7b8 (Freeware)
Graphical user interface for BeSweet.

Blaze Media Pro v9.0 (Shareware)
Blaze Media Pro is an all-in-one multimedia tool with audio and video playback, conversion, and playlists as well as audio editing and recording, and tons more.

CD to MP3 Maker v1.15 (Shareware)
CD Ripper, CD/WAVE to MP3 Encoder, MP3 to CD/WAVE Decoder software

CDRWin v4.0G (Shareware)
CDRWin is a disc duplicator with limited pre-mastering functions

Cucusoft All Audio/Video to MP3/WAV Converter v2.31 (Adware)
Cucusoft All Audio/Video to MP3/WAV Converter is a MP3/WAV creator from almost all kinds of windows Audio and Video media file.

eac3to v3.17 (Freeware)
eac3to is a small commandline utility that converts E-AC3, TrueHD, PCM, DTS-HD and FLAC tracks to AC3/DTS/FLAC and more.

eMule v0.49c (Open source)
eMule is a very good open-source P2P tool that uses the same protocol as eDonkey2000.

Foobar 2000 v0.9.6.9 (Freeware)
Foobar is an advanced audio player for audiophiles

Free WMA to MP3 Converter v1.16 (Freeware)
Free WMA to MP3 Converter can convert Windows Media files to MP3 files which can be played in MP3 Players.

ImTOO MP3 WAV Converter v2.1.77.0717 (Shareware)
ImTOO MP3 WAV Converter is a audio converter.

iTunes v9.0.2 (Freeware)
iTunes is a media player and organizer software for Windows platform from Apple that allows tight integration with the iPod players.

Jet Audio Basic v7.1.1 (Freeware)
Jet Audio is an all-in-one media player. It plays most audio and video formats, supports subtitles, etc.

LAME v3.98.1 (Open source)
Widely used and probably one of the best MP3 encoder available for file conversion.

LimeWire Basic v5.4.0 Beta (Freeware)
LimeWire is a popular peer-to-peer (P2P) application that gives you the ability to share files with other users over the internet.

Media Player Classic v6.4.9.1 (20081210) (Open source)
Media Player Classic is an extremely light-weight media player for Windows. It looks just like the good-old Media Player v6.4, but has lots of nice extra features.

Medieval CUE splitter 1.2 (Open source)
CUE Splitter is a freeware tool that can split a single big audio track, mostly an album or a compilation, into the relative individual audio tracks, using informations contained in the asso

mp3DirectCut v2.11 (Freeware)
The MP3 cut tool that keeps the MP3 encoded

MP3Gain v1.3.4 Beta (Open source)
MP3Gain adjust the volumes of MP3 files or albums

MP3Producer v2.60 (Shareware)
MP3Producer is a program which extracts tracks from audio CD and converts them to MP3 files. The program can work in tree modes: CD to MP3, CD to WAV, WAV to MP3.

mp3Split v0.9.1 (Freeware)
mp3Split splits MP3 files into smaller segments.

MP3TagEditor v2.07 (Shareware)
Audio utility that takes care of all your ID3v1 tags needs.

Oggdrop Vorbis v1.0 (Freeware)
Ogg Vorbis is a high quality, free and unpatented audio compression format

RealPlayer v11.1.3 (Freeware)
Real Player is the all-in-one digital media player that lets you play pretty much everything.

VLC v1.0.3 (Open source)
VLC (initially VideoLAN Client) is a highly portable multimedia player for various audio and video formats such as MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, mp3, ogg, ...

Winamp Full v5.56 (Shareware)
Nullsoft Winamp is a fast, flexible, high-fidelity media player for Windows.

Windows Media Player v11.0.5721.5145 (Freeware)
Windows Media Player is the official multimedia player from Microsoft. Player provides all the features of a modern media player.