What Is MP3 ?
MPEG Layer-3 or better known as MP3 is an advanced audio coding schemes that has been mainly developed by the Audio and Multimedia department of Fraunhofer IIS from Germany. It offers the advantage of playing audio files at the original sound quality at a data reduction up to 12 times of the source file.
The MP3 Surround format offers multi-channel sound while being fully backwards compatible with existing MP3 decoders in the sense that these will decode a stereo downmix of the multichannel sound image. Yet, the data rate required is comparable to conventional stereo MP3.