MP3 Music

About MP3

In laymans terms an mp3 file (eg music.mp3) is a type of compressed audio file. An audio file is one which can be decoded by a suitable player into an audio output stream, usually music. Compressed means made smaller.
A familiar audio file type on a windows computer is a wav file (eg music.wav), which is basically raw digital data representing the original sounds. The problem with wav files is that they can be huge - 30 to 40 Mb for a typical CD track.
An MP3 compressor can process a wav file and to produce an mp3 file which is a tenth of the size (typically 3 to 4 Mb), from which the original sounds can be reproduced with very little loss of quality (un-noticable by most people)

How to play MP3
There are currently two ways to play mp3 files - on your computer from hard disk or CD, or on one of the new portable MP3 player like the Diamond Rio. To play them on your PC you need MP3 playing software. I use WinAmp because it was the first one I came across, and I like it, and see no reason to change. However, there are lots of freeware / shareware offerings around now - check them out at WinFiles. In fact, you will find that the latest windows media players will play MP3 files directly - BUT on my system at least, the media player is nowhere near as efficient as WinAmp - it hogs memory and processor cycles like it owned the machine.

How to make MP3

Making MP3 files from CD tracks is usually a two stage process. The first stage is to extract the CD audio track to a wav file on your hard disk; the second stage is to then convert the wav file to MP3 format. The first process requires CD audio extraction software, and the second is carried out by an MP3 compressor.

Liquid Audio MP3 Studio is a useful freeware product comprising audio extractor, compressor and player: it is certainly worth checking out.