MP3 quality is not that good - sounds like garbage!
MP3 is not full quality audio. Youtube videos are pretty bad quality too.
When mp3 music players came onto the market I was pretty skeptical. They seemed clunky and hard to use, and all of the mp3 music players were a lot more expensive than my lowly Discman. However, it seemed like once the iPod came onto the market just about everyone had an mp3 player.
Even though the quality sucks, people do not seem to mind. It is the same with the youube videos and their horrible quality. The compression adds artifacts and such and makes the videos look awful and the same with MP3's. Compression squeezes the file size down but at the cost of losing data that makes music sound good.
So why are record labels so worried about awful sounding mp3 file sharing? They don't sound as good as cd audio?
The record industry, with their powerful lobbyists they practically write the laws, can sue people for tens of thousands of dollars for using downloading music software to get literally a few songs. Even if they are right, and the illegal downloading of mp3 music software is driving them out of business, it is hard to have much sympathy for an industry which is willing to go to such awful lengths to protect their investments. They want our money and will do anything to get it.
MP3 is a format that should be used for free sharing. The full quality files deserve a higher premium as they sound much better.
You can find hundreds of concert videos with music and video that really are not so good - but they are great for promotion of the music artists. All genres of music are readily available for free on youtube! Look at all the great Gwen Stefani videos you can watch for free!
The iPod is really red-hot, and the extreme popularity came a whole host of other mp3 music players from other manufacturers. These new mp3 players are compact, easy to use, and able to store hours and hours of tiny mp3 file music in a cute littlepackage. They were still pretty expensive, especially for anything that would come near to holding my entire music collection.
What we need are a new era of music players that can play the higher quality file formats yet hold huge libraries of music. Drive space is not as small as in the old days - so bigger files ar efine.
What do you think? Don't we need better quality instead of settling for awful MP3 sound?