The ChiLLout Zone - Intro To MP3

MPEG3 or MP3

MP3 is now the standard format to store music on a computer. The traditional format for storing music was the WAV format, this format is almost identical to the storage format of an Audio-CD. MP3 is superior to WAV format in that CD-quality sound can be achieved in less than 10% of the disk space. For example, recording a 4 minute song from an Audio-CD in WAV format may take 40-50 MB while the same song recorded in the MP3 format will take less than 4 MB, that's less than 1 MB per minute of music! MP3 stands for Motion Picture Engineering Group (MPEG) 1 layer III and was developed by the motion picture industry to provide compact, high quality sound for its projects (ie. films.)

Although recently, through the development of the internet MP3 has taken off in a completly differant way. Whereas MP3 was origanaly invented to assist the entertainment industry it now is a menice to the music industry, you see because MP3s only take on average 3megs its easy to work out that some smart ass decided to put music on the net to download! Hundreds of sites then apeared and millions of people began logging on to download music.

Then throught the mist came a program/site called Napster. Napster was a simple but brilliant idea, to share files bettween others, (song swapping) when you log on you open up your tracks to be downloaded by millions of other users all over the world. Napster started off as a small site running from a small sever only coping with 2 to 3 digit numbers then progrest to millions at its present state it has about 60 million users and is the biggest song swapping service of any kind ever in the history of this planet. Because of the pure size and the amount of songs swapped Napster is now at war with the major record labels so keep your eye on its progress at there site; www.napster.com and even show your support in a number of ways suggested on the site.

Please contact me at [email protected]for any comments or suggestions.

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