For millions of people, mp3 songs have been a revolutionary new way to experience music. They’ve loved the prospect of storing huge quantities of music on their computers, and enjoying the freedom to shuffle and rearrange tracks at a moment’s notice. They’ve also discovered a whole new world of independent artists who can publish their work without the assistance of the traditional record industry. For many, these changes have inspired renewed interest in the art of sound production.
MP3 files compress music to around a tenth of their original size, making them much more portable than the uncompressed audio that would fit on a 640 MB CD. This is important to people who are downloading music online, or using mobile devices that have limited storage capacity. Using MP3 compression techniques, a three-minute song can be turned into a 3 MB file, which is easily within the capacity of any web browser, or the download limit of most Internet services.
MP3 Songs: Discover Free and Legal Ways to Download Music
While some musicians and audiophiles complain that the loss of quality when converting a CD song to an MP3 file is too great, most users feel that 320 kbps is a high enough bit rate to produce a music track that sounds nearly identical to the original. It is a significant improvement over the 16 kbps that was used in the first generation of MP3 files, and is close to the maximum bit rate supported by most players.
An additional advantage of the MP3 file format is that it can store a certain amount of “meta-data” inside the file itself. Information such as the track title, artist name, album name, year, genre, and even your own personal comments on a particular track can be stored in each individual file’s ID3 tags. These can be inserted automatically by most tools as the files are ripped, or added manually using database-oriented MP3 organizers.
A feature of the MP3 file that makes it especially useful is that it can be “live-updated” with new music as it’s downloaded to your computer, or added from a portable device such as an iPod. This live updating makes the MP3 file a powerful tool for anyone who regularly updates their music collection.
The most popular website for downloading MP3 songs is Amazon, which offers both single tracks and entire albums for purchase at very reasonable prices. Other notable sites include Bandcamp, which lets you download a single track by putting a zero in the payment box and following the onscreen prompts, and ReverbNation, which has a huge collection of tracks by up-and-coming bands.
Most of the music that can be purchased from eMusic and other online stores is offered at 192 kbps resolution, which provides good quality for most users. However, some sources — such as the music sections of band websites and podcast directories — offer songs at a higher resolution of up to 256 kbps. These songs are usually available without copy protection, which makes them more compatible with a wider range of MP3 players.