Java Programming

Hi All

I fairly new to the field of mp3s and their structure etc. I'm hoping someone will be able to point me in the right direction. I'm trying to develope a java application to extract the mp3 data so that I can manipulate it. However I only have a basic understanding of the tags in the mp3 file structure and not the decoding process - so I can look at the data in a meaningful way.

As an example jpeg files are compressed etc. So I was able to cobble together a java program to return a 2x2 matrix that stored RGB values of the pixels in the spatial domain.

I'm dealing wih sound here so I'm looking for a way to extract the sound data and store it in a logical way. I've downloaded JMF and the mp3 plugIn, but I don't quite see how to use these tools to extract and decode the data byte by byte.

Any help would be appreciated

Thank you