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The MP3 is a complete godsend for anyone who enjoys and appreciates good music. Not only does it afford users the convenience of purchasing music online and ripping from purchased CDs, it also provides the utmost ease in portability. There are more MP3 players on the market than I can name. These players allow you to download hundreds and in some cases thousands of MP3's to take along with you anywhere. I create MP3 CD's containing up to 120 of my favorite songs for my listening pleasure in my car. But how can so many audio files get stored on my 800MB (Megabyte) CD?

MP3 Encoders and MP3 converters are the software that creates MP3s by using an MP3 compression and decompression algorithm. For example, an average 3 minute WAV file can be as large as 15MB. Using MP3 encoders and MP3 converters, a large WAV file can be cut down to a much smaller and more portable MP3 file of about 3MB.

MP3 stands for MPEG Audio Layer 3. At layer 3, psychoacoustics principles are used to find and remove all unnecessary sound data, leaving behind only the crucial audio data. By unnecessary sound data I mean all of the stuff that we humans don't hear anyway. Most people can't hear sounds above 16 kHz so why would you want it hogging your disk or hard drive space? Non-music audio such as speeches, sermons, audio books and comedy albums, can be reduced even less based on this.

Compression occurs after the essential data has been separated from the redundant data. At this stage, the same amount of data can be stored using fewer bits and less space. The bit rate is the ratio of the number of bits transferred between two devices per second. The higher the bit rate, the higher the sound quality. The lower the bit rate ratio, the lower the sound quality. 192 Kb/s is the most popular bit rate used in peer-to-peer networks. For the most part, MP3 converters and encoders today use variable bit rates. This allows for much better quality audio because the bit rate conforms to the dynamics of the audio frames being stored which in turn keeps more of the important music data.

There are dozens of MP3 compressor and encoder software programs available online and at stores. Some of the main encoding engines are: LAME, Blade Enc, Fraunhofer Encoders and Xing. Deciding which MP3 encoding engine technology is right for you depends on your individual needs and preferences. Blaze Media Pro is an excellent option if you're looking for a powerful, yet easy to use, all-in-one multimedia solution.