| WHAT THE HELL
IS AN MP3?
'WAV' files and 'MP3' files
Computers have been able to store actual
sound recordings for some time. They are called .wav or au. files.
(There are some other formats too)
Trouble is, to make recordings of any decent quality takes up a fair bit
of room on your hard drive. (An average
music CD is about 650 megabytes. - even in these days of multi-gig
drives, that is still a fair bit of space.)
Large sound files are also difficult to transport
and share around the NET.
If you are using a phone connection for your Internet service it could
take a day or so to get a CD if it was in the form of a wave file!)
What to do?
well, the sounds nerds have been working on compressing sound recordings
so that they don't take up as much room. And they've done it.
MP3 files are actual recordings of songs,
(unlike MIDI files) and a typical 3 minute
pop-song may be just 2-3 megabytes (compared to 20-30 meg in a wav
file) If you have a fine musical ear, you may not like the results, but to
most users it will sound like full CD quality.
So this has made it very easy and
economical to store recordings.
(A CD of MP3 files may contain as many as 168 songs!)
This has also made it easier to share
them around the NET.
(However, if you are on a slow modem it can still time consuming)
THIS has upset the record companies of
course.
AND THIS is what the closing of NAPTSER
was all about.
GROKSTER is still operating and
is the most user-friendly alternative to NAPSTER that I have found,
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