mp3 format - means he doesn't have to take up his HDD with full wav or cda files.

mp3 format - means he can accept songs from people over the internet, meaning some of us without tapes or cds (yet!) can still send in something.

Now, to convert to cda, still means a full-length CD, where if you burned a CD full of mp3's we could get a LOT more songs for the money. But... not everyone can play mp3 CDs, and very few car stereos will play them. You need either a computer or one of those newfangled mp3-CD players.

Skips - if you are getting skips when you convert to mp3 or wav:
1. Make sure you have a clean CD and a clean CD drive. Dust and grease will cause skips.
2. Use a slower CD speed setting, like 8x or even 4x or 2x - sometimes if the computer reads it too fast, it'll cause skips. That read setting will be somewhere in your program. 3. If those don't work, use CDex to extract/convert the file. CDex is one of the best audio extracting (CD-ripper) software programs out there, and is very easy to use. Oh, and it's free!