Shoutbox

quote:

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Originally posted by raceprouk
MP3 is a format designed by Apple, and doesn't offer content protection.
WMA is a Microsoft format, and is supposed to have better compression. Whether it does or not is debatable, but it does have support for content protection.

Both support ID tags of some sort, and are supported by most players. WMA support on Linux is somewhat lacking, but that's because WMA is an MS format.

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MP3 is short for Moving Picture Experts Group, Audio Layer III, and is a compression format that shrinks audio files with only a small sacrifice in sound quality. MP3 files can be compressed at different rates, but the more they are scrunched, the worse the sound quality. A standard MP3 compression is at a 10:1 ratio, and yields a file that is about 4 MB for a three-minute track.

It all started in the mid-1980s, at the Fraunhofer Institut in Erlangen, Germany, which began work on a high quality, low bit-rate audio coding with the help of Dieter Seitzer, a professor at the University of Erlangen. In 1989, Fraunhofer was granted a patent for MP3 in Germany and a few years later it was submitted to the International Standards Organization (ISO), and integrated into the MPEG-1 specification.

Sourced from: MP3 Overview