MP3: The Definitive Guide

The Anatomy of an MP3 File

Aside from being familiar with the basic options available to the MP3 encoder, the typical user doesn’t need to know how MP3 files are structured internally any more than she needs to know how JPEG images or Word documents are structured behind the scenes. For the morbidly curious, however, here’s an x-ray view of the MP3 file format.

Inside the Header Frame

As mentioned earlier, MP3 files are segmented into zillions of frames, each containing a fraction of a second’s worth of audio data, ready to be reconstructed by the decoder. Inserted at the beginning of every data frame is a “header frame,” which stores 32 bits of meta-data related to the coming data frame (Figure 2.4). As illustrated in Figure 2.5,^[21] the MP3 header begins with a "sync” block, consisting of 11 bits. The sync block allows players to search for and “lock onto” the first available occurrence of a valid frame, which is useful in MP3 broadcasting, for moving around quickly from one part of a track to another, and for skipping ID3 or other data that may be living at the start of the file. However, note that it’s not enough for a player to simply find the sync block in any binary file and assume that it’s a valid MP3 file, since the same pattern of 11 bits could theoretically be found in any random binary file. Thus, it’s also necessary for the decoder to check for the validity of other header data as well, or for multiple valid frames in a row. Table 2.1 lists the total 32 bits of header ...