Description

This article is from the MPEG FAQ, by Frank Gadegast phade@cs.tu-berlin.de with numerous contributions by others.

33 So we have a family of three audio coding schemes. What does the MPEG standard define, exactly? (MPEG Audio Codec Family ("Layer 1, 2, 3"))

For each Layer, the standard specifies the bitstream format and the
decoder. To allow for future improvements, it does *not* specify the
encoder, but an informative chapter gives an example for an encoder for
each Layer.

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