What is the difference between an MP3 file and a conventional WAV file?
Conventional WAV files are not compressed. For sound or music of any significant duration, WAV files are huge. The size of a normal good quality WAV file is very roughly 10MB per minute of sound or music, whereas that of the equivalent MP3 file is very roughly 1MB per minute. In other words, the MP3 file is very roughly one tenth of the size of the equivalent WAV file, with no discernible difference in quality. However, the compression ratio does depend on the nature of the sound or music recorded in the file and therefore can differ. The much smaller size of MP3 files makes it feasible to store them on the sizes of hard disks commonly found on modern PC’s and also to download them via the Internet within a reasonable time, even with only a modem connection.
