MP3 is a widely used lossy audio format that balances sound quality with smaller file sizes.
High-bitrate MP3 files are suitable for many DJ applications.
Its real advantage is not sound quality, it is that everything plays it. Every piece of DJ software, every club media player, every laptop and phone made in the last twenty-five years handles MP3 without argument, which is why it remains the default currency of the scene even though newer formats encode more efficiently. When compatibility matters more than anything else, MP3 is the format that will not let you down.
For performance use, 320 kbps is the number to want. Lower bitrates such as 128 or 192 are fine for casual listening but start showing their limits on a large sound system, where the thin, slightly smeared high end becomes noticeable in a way it never is through headphones or laptop speakers. Cymbals and vocal sibilance are usually where you hear it first.
It is also the only format with no compatibility caveats worth writing down. MP3 appears on the supported list of every major platform, and unlike AAC and FLAC it carries no platform exceptions, no mode restrictions and no extra software requirements. See rekordbox, Serato and Traktor. If you only keep one copy of a track and you do not know what you will be playing on, keep the 320 kbps MP3.
The origin of MP3
It was created to solve a bandwidth problem. In the 1980s, researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute in Germany, led by Karlheinz Brandenburg and building on Dieter Seitzer’s idea of sending music down ordinary telephone lines, needed a way to shrink audio that was simply too large to move or store. CD quality runs at around 1,400 kbps, far beyond what the networks and hard drives of the time could cope with. Their solution was to stop storing the sound itself and store only the part a listener would actually notice, which got a track down to roughly a tenth of its original size and made the entire internet music era possible. It was standardised as part of MPEG-1 in the early 1990s and picked up the .mp3 extension in 1995. Brandenburg famously tuned the encoder against Suzanne Vega’s “Tom’s Diner”, because a bare vocal exposes encoding artefacts that a dense mix hides, which is the same reason thin files still give themselves away on vocals today.
See Also
Bitrate, Lossy Audio, file format, and AAC