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By Giancarlo Varanini, ZDNet Music
With all the controversy currently surrounding the digital-audio format known as MPEG Layer III, or MP3, you might wonder how the digital-audio industry evolved from tinny-sounding MIDI files into near-CD-quality MP3 files. With all the technical jargon, it's difficult to figure out why this breakthrough is so revolutionary. The reason is simple: MP3 dramatically reduces file size with only a small loss of quality.
In the late 1980s the digital-music industry stalled. Multimedia was outpacing the computer industry's ability to produce a large enough storage format that would let musicians store their digital work. The dominant compression scheme at the time, JPEG or Joint Photographics Expert Group, was only used for still images, and it couldn't handle the compression of high-quality movies or audio.
So What Happened?
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