How is MP3 built?

Most people with a little knowledge in MP3 files know that the sound is divided into smaller parts and compressed with a psycoacoustic model. This smaller pieces of the audio is then put into something called 'frames', which is a little datablock with a header. I'll focus on that header in this text.

The header is 4 bytes, 32 bits, big and begins with something called sync. This sync is, at least according to the MPEG standard, 12 set bits in a row. Some add-on standards made later uses 11 set bits and one cleared bit. The sync is directly followed by a ID bit, indicating if the file is a MPEG-1 och MPEG-2 file. 0=MPEG-2 and 1=MPEG-1

The layer is defined with the two layers bits. They are oddly defined as BR

With this information and the information in the bitrate field we can determine the bitrate of the audio (in kbit/s) according to this table.