Introduction
This most popular digital format for audio compression today was developed several years ago by a small German company Fraunhofer IIS. European corporation THOMSON actively supported the new format and made every effort to distribute it as quickly as possible. In particular, with its support a newcomer became one of the standards of audio compression family MPEG1, MPEG2 and was named MPEG Layer3 or more familiar to us MP3.
The Revolution of Sound
The appearance of this format is most appropriately called a quiet revolution. A revolution – because before MP3 no audio file format could provide such quality at such a relatively small size. The only .RA (real audio) network format at the time was nothing but a mockery of hearing. MPEG Layer3 was conceived precisely as the “killer” of this wretched monopolist, a giant on clay legs. MP3 is a format designed specifically for the Internet, to quickly send quality sound anywhere. That is why MP3 is a streaming format, which means it will be considered in the future. The ability of this compression algorithm to reduce the size of sound files almost without loss of quality, looked absolutely fantastic at the time. After all, even when encoding with maximum stream width (bitrate) equal to 320 kbs (kilobit per second), and this sound quality is almost indistinguishable from the original, the size of the original WAV file is reduced by four times!
Yes, it was a revolution, but a very strange one. After all, this unique algorithm was hanging literally by a thread at the beginning of its existence. Complete lack of advertising, no music players of this format, except for the branded Fraunhofer IIS, which was characterized by extremely poor design, terrible control and exorbitant system requirements. Add also huge appetites of the developers themselves, who wanted for their codecs (CODEC – COder/DECoder) quite a lot of money (similar situation now with some formats of the family AAC) and the lack of music as such, as opposed to solid deposits of music in the format of RA. These factors could well kill a newborn immediately after delivery. And all lovers of good music should say a huge thank you to those famous and unnamed developers of freeware MP3 CODEC, who didn’t let the creator of this format Fraunhofer IIS company because of their marketing stupidity and greed to destroy a brilliant creation.

“Of course, the question is not about the difference between MP3 and FLAC, it’s wider than that: than lossy compression formats (MP3, AAC, WMA, Ogg Vorbis and others; that is, lossy) are different from “lossless” formats (FLAC, ALAC, APE, WavPack and others; that is, lossless). In fact, with this formulation, it becomes clear that in the first group of formats the original data is not completely saved, and the second can be restored to the original format (for example, Wav or Aiff, extracted from CD) without lossy. What is lost and in what proportions depends on the specific type of lossy files and their bitrate, i.e. the degree of compression. But to say that all MP3s sound lousy, and “flasks” are ideal – this is the top of arrogance and incompetence. Audio formats with loss of quality have been developing for over twenty years, serious research laboratories (Fraunhofer Institute, for example, in addition to working on MP3 is also famous for the invention of the most effective solar panel) and a group of enthusiasts. Coding mathematics is constantly being improved, and nowadays it is not so easy to distinguish files produced by different codecs by hearing.