RE: [aclug-L] Potential Topic : Disaster Recovery ...

[Carl D Cravens <raven@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, 22 Apr 1999, Michael Holmes wrote:

> excuse my ignorance, but what is mp3?

You're not familiar with MP3?  (MPEG Layer 3, a lossy audio compression
format.)  It's only the greatest waster of corporate bandwidth since Doom
was invented.  There are hundreds of starving musicians just *giving* away
their music on the Internet in hopes of landing a contract, or just
because they like to share, sometimes giving you sample tracks asking you
to buy the whole CD if you like it.

In my first two weeks, I downloaded over 700 MB worth of music... about
700 minutes worth, all for free, and most of it rather good.  The great
thing about MP3 is its high compression ratio compared to the quality...
still sounds great after smashing the file size by as much as 12:1.  
Imagine being able to get 150 songs, or over 600 minutes worth of music,
on a single CD-ROM.  :)

http://www.mp3.com./

Now, MP3 isn't music, it's just an audio format... but it's a *free*
format that compresses audio enough that a person can download a song over
a modem without waiting all night to hear it.  It's made the distribution
of free music over the internet feasable.  (It's also made piracy a
problem, but that's bound to happen.) 

--
Carl (raven@xxxxxxxxxxx)