About MP3 Codecs

In the computer age of today digitalized audio files have become the norm for our musical pleasure. Long gone are the days of vinyl discs which can now only be found in special shops and in the homes of collectors or true music fans that have decided to hold on to the music rendering methods of days passed.

The MP3 file is the standard file format for music played on our computers, in our cars in CDs that we fill up with MP3 songs and even in the music players we all carry around with us. The music players have become MP3 players, leaving behind the notion that we are only listening to a song and enabling us to come in contact with the computer language at every step. By this MP3 players are almost compelling us to know the format in each song in our ears comes in.

MP3 is the most common audio file type used by people on their computers. Usually when playing media files on a computer it needs some sort of specific codec to work. A codec can be one of two things: either a computer program that encodes or decodes data OR a compression format, which is also named ‘standard’ – document for storing data. The MP3 codecs in this case has two separate meanings as well.

MP3 stands for MPEG (-1 or -2) Audio Layer III and it is the standard for storing audio data into a file which has the termination ‘.mp3’. Computers today can all see and read MP3 files, making specialized codecs that serve this purpose virtually obsolete. However the LAME MP3 codec is a computer software that makes it possible for a device to read MP3 audio files. Another of MP3 audio codecs is the FFmpeg MP3 codec, which is used only for decoding as opposed to LAME, used only for encoding.