What is the difference between MP3 and MP4?

MP3 or Mpeg layer-3 and MP4 or Mpeg layer-4 are two types of audio compression formats. Although both are recent technologies, MP3 is the older of the two. Before MP4 was developed, MP3 came at a time when people needed an audio format that would support audio compression into smaller sizes. However, MP4 was released to improve on some of the limitations of MP3. For instance, one of the issues with MP3 is that it produces echoes in audio files. The technology used by MP3 allows it to eliminate audio data that cannot be heard by the human ear. On the other hand, the technology used by MP4 is similar to that of MP3 just that the former produces quality media that seems to be better than that of MP3. Unlike MP3 that functions majorly as an audio compression format, MP4 also offers compression for video files. Invariably, MP4 offers better quality than MP3.

When you say MP3s, you are referring to audio-only files. This means that if you would save some files in this format, you cannot expect that they will be able to handle images or videos. When you say MP4s, you are referring to multimedia files. They will be able to play different types of files, from audio files to video files.

The main reason for this is that MP4 will have the ability to contain different types of data, unlike MP3, which will only have the ability to store codes. If you would like to get better audio quality, you should choose MP4, but if you do not want your audio files to take too much space on your gadget, using MP3 files will be fine too.