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Player Info |
Supported Files & Formats |
AOL Audio Player Info |
AOL Video Player Info |
MP3 Support
MP3, short for MPEG-1 Layer 3, is an audio compression format common on the Net these days.
It allows larger audio recordings to be shrunk down in size but offers little if any sound fidelity.
It is a very common format with a lot of free players available online.
Layer 3 is one of three coding schemes (layer 1, layer 2 and layer 3)
for the compression of audio signals. Layer 3 uses perceptual audio
coding and psychoacoustic compression to remove all superfluous information
(more specifically, the redundant and irrelevant parts of a sound
signal. The sound the human ear doesn't hear anyway). It
also adds a MDCT (Modified Discrete Cosine Transform)
that implements a filter bank, increasing the frequency
resolution 18 times higher than that of layer 2.
The result in real terms is layer 3 shrinks the original sound
data from a CD (with a *bitrate of 1411.2 kilobits per one second
of stereo music) by a factor of 12 (down to 112-128kbps) without
sacrificing sound quality.
Because MP3 files are small, they can easily be transferred
across the Internet.
Current version of AOL client uses a slimmed down version of
WinAmp client as part of its media player. Mp3 files access the WinAmp audio player in the AOL Client.
Outside of the AOL client, Mp3 files are supported by SHOUTcast
which is AOL/Nullsoft's Free Winamp-based distributed streaming audio system.
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