The hot item on the Web right now is MP3. The latter had been the reigning champion for years. All the recording industry executives hate MP3, and everybody else seems to love it. For those not up on the latest Web fads, MP3 is short for MPEG-1 Layer 3, a method to compress high quality sound into a small package with almost the same fidelity as the original. It is common for an MP3 file to be a tenth the size of the original.
Typical songs are well under three megabytes in size.
The 'Net is littered with thousands of MP3 sites offering legal and illegal MP3's for download. MP3 seems destined to become the next big media format for music. Anyone with speakers or headphones on their Mac and MP3 player software can hop onto the Internet and download MP3 files to play at their leisure. Even better, several companies are producing tiny, personal, portable MP3 players to store and play back the MP3 files downloaded from your computer. They're kind of like a portable CD player that can't skip.