I am studying a BSc in Audio Recording Technology and need to understand exactly how MP3 is encoded.

I understand the path taken ie through a 36 band PQF and into a MDCT but dont really understand how these work.

I understand M/S encoding and the pyschoacoustics behind MP3, ie both temporal and frequency masking.

I need to understand exactly how the PCM audio is converted, what happens to the actual binary bit stream, the differences between different rate MP3 files (as in where the resolution is lost in the signal chain) etc.

Oh and I also understand Huffman encoding, Shannon encoding and stuff like ADPCM.

Any help is much appriciated

Matt