MP3
The format that put a thousand songs in your pocket.
Where it came from
MP3 grew out of Fraunhofer's EUREKA research in the late 80s and was finalized as MPEG-1 Audio Layer III in 1993. It rode Napster and portable players to total cultural dominance in 1999–2005.
All patents expired in April 2017 — the format is now completely free, which is why it refuses to die despite technically superior successors.
How it works
MP3 is lossy: it chops audio into frequency bands and discards what psychoacoustic models say you can't hear — quiet sounds next to loud ones, frequencies above ~16 kHz at typical bitrates. At 128–192 kbps VBR most listeners can't tell it from CD audio.
Decoding is lossless in the sense that every player produces identical PCM; encoding always loses information. Converting MP3 → FLAC doesn't restore quality, it just stops further loss.
UWC decodes MP3 with the browser's own Web Audio engine and re-encodes to WAV/FLAC/OGG/Opus locally — no ffmpeg, no uploads.
Convert MP3 audio
MP3 to WAV for editing, to Opus/OGG for streaming — all in your browser via Web Audio.