BBC Help
What is an mp3?
MP3 is a popular digital music format for sound files, that are small in size but still reasonably high quality.
This makes it a very suitable format for downloading from the web - audio files can be reduced to around a tenth of their normal size without significant loss of quality. This is achieved by stripping out a lot of the recorded information that our ears aren't able to hear, like the sounds that are outside our hearing range.
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