The music in my bug will be supplied by a MP3 player...

A what you ask? Here it is

This CD walkman size player can hold over 10hrs of music on one CD, that's over 180 track on a CD. A mobile junk box... and with a remote.

MP3 has been the buzzword of the year on both the Internet and throughout the record industry, I will try and explain the mysteries of MP3.

The hype around MP3 has been phenomenal, but with it has come many misapprehensions about what exactly it is and what you can do with it. The most common statement we hear from the uninitiated is that MP3 is illegal. Let's clear this one up for starters. MP3 is not illegal. It is simply a file format. There's no denying that MP3 files can be used illegally, but so can your cassette deck. The publicity about law-breaking MP3 pirates shouldn't dissuade you from taking an interest in this revolutionary way of delivering music.

SIZE MATTERS

If it's just a file format, then our next question has to be 'what's so special about it?' To answer this, we need to get a bit technical. Let's start with what we had before the arrival of MP3. The most common audio file format used in computing was the WAV file. This is the file type that, among other things, is used to make all the 'beeps' that Windows produces whenever you perform an action, such as emptying your recycle bin.

The sound quality of WAV files is excellent, but there is one huge problem that has prevented them from becoming useful on the Internet for anything other than short sound bites - such as the clips and quotes from your favorite TV shows that the Net is awash with.

The problem is size. WAV files are huge. Take, for example, the sound your PC makes every time you start Windows. It only lasts a few seconds, yet the file' The Microsoft Sound.wav' takes up a staggering 676K. This is why many PC owners who are a bit short on hard disk space make it one of their first priorities to delete all the unnecessary WAV files from their systems.

MPEG Audio LAYER-3

MP3 - or MPEG Audio Layer-3 to acknowledge its full title is basically a file format which produces near CD quality, in about one twelfth of the space of a WAV file. It was developed by the Moving Picture Experts Group hence the acronym which was responsible for MPEG-1, MPEG-2 and the development of MPEG-4. There is no MPEG-3, as such, and the MP3 that we know is simply the file extension for what is one of three MPEG audio coding schemes (Layer-1, Layer-2 and Layer-3).

The principle behind MPEG is to provide, as its name suggests, more than just audio formats. The most common application of MPEG-2 that you will be familiar with is that of DVD. It's all about producing high quality in a small amount of data, and its potential for providing music across the Internet was quickly exploited.