What is an "MP3"?

What is an "MP3"?

Ethan Feerst and Dylan Stewart (Technology Therapist, Mac Guru) gives expert video advice on: Is it legal to download copyrighted media via the Internet?; How does file sharing work?; Can I watch my favorite TV shows over the Internet? and more...

MP3 is really one of the most common forms of music on the internet. The actual files that music is stored on are extremely large. In order to get CD quality sound, it takes approximately 1 megabytes per minute of song. MP3 is a compression format that allows you to maintain most of the quality of CD at a tenth of the size of the CD audio format. What that means, is that a song that would have been 45 or 5 megabytes, a large file by anyone's standards, is only 3 or 4 megabytes and able to be downloaded in a few minutes on dial-up or a few seconds on DSL.