Before the time of MP3's, PC users have been downloading, recording,  and playing high-quality sound files using a format called WAV.

          The trouble with WAV's  is their enormous size. A two-minute WAV file (in CD quality) would take up about 20MB of your precious hard drive space. Another downside to WAV's is that they take forever to download.

          Thats where MP3 comes in. Thanks to the efforts of the Moving Picture Experts Group. The  most popular standard, MPEG, produces high-quality audio files in substantially smaller packages than those produced by WAV. MPEG filters out useless  information from the original audio source. As the result of this  much smaller audio files with very little loss in quality are made.

          Ever since MPEG came into the scene, engineers have been scrambling  to squeeze high-quality audio into ever smaller packages. MP3--short for MPEG 1 Audio Layer 3--is the latest of the more advanced coding schemes. It adds a number of advanced features to the original MPEG process and uses entropy encoding to reduce to a minimum the number of redundant sounds in an audio signal. Tthe MP3 standard will take music from a CD and shrink it by a factor of 12, with no real loss of quality.