Any audiophiles here?

MP3 uses two compression techniques to achieve its size reduction ratios over uncompressed audio-one lossy and one lossless. First it throws away what humans can't hear anyway (or at least it makes acceptable compromises), and then it encodes the redundancies to achieve further compression. However, it's the first part of the process that does most of the grunt work, requires most of the complexity, and chiefly concerns us here.

Perceptual codecs are highly complex beasts, and all of them work a little differently. However, the general principles of perceptual coding remain the same from one codec to the next. In brief, the MP3 encoding process can be subdivided into a handful of discrete tasks (not necessarily in this order):

• Break the signal into smaller component pieces called " frames," each typically lasting a fraction of a second. You can think of frames much as you would the frames in a movie film.

• Analyze the signal to determine its "spectral energy distribution." In other words, on the entire spectrum of audible frequencies, find out how the bits will need to be distributed to best account for the audio to be encoded. Because different portions of the frequency spectrum are most efficiently encoded via slight variants of the same algorithm, this step breaks the signal into sub-bands, which can be processed independently for optimal results (but note that all sub-bands use the algorithm-they just allocate the number of bits differently, as determined by the encoder).

• The encoding bitrate is taken into account, and the maximum number of bits that can be allocated to each frame is calculated. For instance, if you're encoding at 128 kbps, you have an upper limit on how much data can be stored in each frame (unless you're encoding with variable bitrates, but we'll get to that later). This step determines how much of the available audio data will be stored, and how much will be left on the cutting room floor.

• The frequency spread for each frame is compared to mathematical models of human psychoacoustics, which are stored in the codec as a reference table. From this model, it can be determined which frequencies need to be rendered accurately, since they'll be perceptible to humans, and which ones can be dropped or allocated fewer bits, since we wouldn't be able to hear them anyway. Why store data that can't be heard?

• The bitstream is run through the process of " Huffman coding," which compresses redundant information throughout the sample. The Huffman coding does not work with a psychoacoustic model, but achieves additional compression via more traditional means.[5] Thus, you can see the entire MP3 encoding process as a two-pass system: First you run all of the psychoacoustic models, discarding data in the process, and then you compress what's left to shrink the storage space required by any redundancies. This second step, the Huffman coding, does not discard any data-it just lets you store what's left in a smaller amount of space.

• The collection of frames is assembled into a serial bitstream, with header information preceding each data frame. The headers contain instructional "meta-data" specific to that frame