It seems to me that one of the important factors of MP3 or whatever will eventually be the next dominant method of music distribution is the ability to have a large collection of music on a physically small device, and which the consumer will be able to select the tracks he or she wants to hear (i.e. recordability). Also an important factor (one I've been suffering through tape eating tape decks, warped & scratched records, scratched CD's, etc for years while waiting for, having forseen the inevitablility of it 20 years ago) is the total absence of moving parts. So far MP3 looks to be meeting these requirements.

Meanwhile on my other question about MP3 sound quality on my PC. I have grabbed tracks off of CD's and stored them as wave files. Theoretically they should sound identical to the CD tracks but they don't - they are just as bad as the MP3 (still way better than RealAudio though). I wonder if the Digital to Analog converters on my sound card are messing things up? I'm pretty sure that the CD Rom drive has it's own D/A converters, and the cable from it to the sound card only goes to the analog part of card (otherwise you couldn't listen to audio CD's with headphones plugged into your CD Rom drive, right?). So the D/A converters must be at fault. The other possibility is that since MP3 is compressed, it obviously takes some processing power to decompress it, and maybe my 90MHz Pentium isn't up to the task? Or maybe the shareware/freeware I'm using isn't. I guess my question is, will those of you who think your MP3's are nearly indistiguishable from CD quality please describe what hardware/software combination you use to get those results? Probably I ought to put this on a separate thread.