The internet is a major part of how we buy, sell and share music. Therefore, it’s important to understand its limitations and how to make the most of the technology available.

The internet has come on leaps and bounds since its inception, but there are still some users who have relatively slow internet connections.

This makes it very difficult to share large files with them, which limits the use of high quality Wav files like the ones we prefer to use in music production.

While the internet was developing, in 1993 the Fraunhofer Institute developed an audio format which retained the majority of the quality of an audio file but at approximately 1/10th of the file size. This was called MP3.

• MP3 is actually an abbreviation of ‘Mpeg 1 audio layer III’ but as that’s a mouthful, the term MP3 is more commonly used.
• MP3 is a ‘lossy’ format. This means that there is a trade off in quality in order to reduce the file size. Wav on the other hand is ‘lossless’.
  • Lossy audio formats include MP3, MP4, AAC, OGG.
  • Lossless audio file formats include WAV, AIFF, FLAC, ALAC.
  • Lossy formats have made it possible for services such as Napster, iTunes, Spotify, and many others to operate via the limited bandwidth of the internet.

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