Reply #3: The significance of MP3 is... [View All]

[trogdor]

...data compression. You can cram between 12 and 15 ALBUMS of music on one CD, and they still sound better than the product of the best, most expensive cassette deck recording on the best quality tape you can buy. A three minute song is about 3 MB in size. I play these CD's in my car, on a stereo I bought at Best Buy for $200 a couple of years ago. I suspect a similar system can be had now for 2/3 or less that.

The MP3-capable CD players now cost as little as $20. A hard drive based MP3 player now has between 20 GB and 40 GB of space, which translates to 5000 and 10000 MP3 files respectively. The latter can easily house my ENTIRE music collection, including the CD copies I made of my LP collection, at least 300 albums in all, and still not come close to full. These cost around $200-$300 or so.