Word: mp3
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...fear, loathing and litigation, the music and consumer-electronics industries have decided to try to make beautiful music together. Last week the Secure Digital Music Initiative--a coalition of 100 music, electronics and high-tech companies--announced that it was provisionally blessing a controversial music format known as MP3...
...MP3, in case you've lost your abbreviations handbook, is a compression scheme that allows the digital music in CDs to be shrunk to a tenth its size and still sound great. MP3 songs are small enough to be traded online, and they are by the millions--to the consternation of record companies, which fear that everything ever released on disc will end up online for free...
Some 20 million recordable CD drives are expected to sell in the U.S. this year, three times as many as last year. Partly, that's owing to ever falling costs; you can now get a decent one for $250 or less. Another reason is the spread of MP3, the hugely popular standard for downloading music online. What better way to store your MP3 collection than on CDs? Blank CD-R discs (which can record only once) cost about $2 each and hold 650 MB of data. If you figure an average of 5 MB per MP3 tune, one disc holds...
...record companies have yet to agree on a standard for distributing music digitally online, but hope to have one by June. They're worried about protecting copyrights and being able to charge money for downloads. Meanwhile, the Net has already settled on a standard, called MP3, which squeezes CD-quality music into files about one-tenth their original size while retaining most of the music's high fidelity. The standard is controversial because it allows people (kids, mostly) to swap music online--piracy, the record companies charge. Yet millions do it, despite the irritating download wait...
...probably didn't help the record companies' cause that just two days before the Universal announcement, RealNetworks launched its JukeBox. RealNetworks is the biggest name in online audio (and video), bigger even than Microsoft. When it declared that JukeBox would embrace the MP3 format--allowing users to effortlessly encode their CDs in it--it was clear to me the gig was up. And to a lot of other folks too. More than 350,000 people downloaded the JukeBox software in 2 1/2 days, the fastest online "uptake" on record...