What is a MP3 file?
MP3 (MPEG-1 Audio Layer III) came out of the Fraunhofer Institute in the early 1990s and turned music into something you could email. It uses a psychoacoustic model to discard sounds masked by louder ones, shrinking CD audio about tenfold. The patents expired in 2017, so it is now completely free to use.
Newer codecs such as AAC and Opus sound better at the same bitrate, but nothing beats MP3 for compatibility: car stereos, old MP3 players, DJ software, podcast hosts and every browser play it. Use 192 kbps or more for music and 64–96 kbps for speech.
| Extensions | .mp3 |
|---|---|
| MIME type | audio/mpeg |
| Compression | Lossy |
| Typical bitrate | 128–320 kbps |
| Tags | ID3v2 (title, artist, album, cover) |
| Developed by | Fraunhofer IIS / MPEG, 1993 |
Convert MP3 to…
Every conversion listed works in the converter above: add a MP3 file and pick the target format.
Convert to MP3 from…
WAV, M4A, FLAC, OGG, OPUS, MP4, MOV, WEBM, MKV, AVI
Detailed guides: MP4 to MP3 · WAV to MP3 · M4A to MP3 · FLAC to MP3 · OPUS to MP3
Part of the audio converter · all formats.