What Is MP3?
Quite simply, MP3 is the name for a digital music format that manages to compress rather large audio files into incredibly small, yet almost CD-quality, files. This, in turn, lets users store them on their computers, upload and download them over the Internet, and even e-mail them to friends.
As an example of how great the powers of MP3 are, consider the classic Beach Boys song God Only Knows. As a standard CD file, it fills up 29MB of hard-drive space. This one track would take almost two hours to download with a 56K modem. When converted to MP3 format, though, this same file is a little more than 3MB, just one-tenth the size! Granted, it would still take ten minutes to download from the Web over a modem, but you can store multiple MP3s on your hard drive or download them rapidly over an ISDN or faster connection.
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