With the advent of multimedia on the PC, spurred by the introduction of Sound Blaster� audio, it was not long before people realized they could play their music CDs on their PC with 'CD quality.' With the Internet and consumer validation of e-commerce, PC entertainment enthusiasts have been quick to catch on to the possibilities of having access to huge libraries of music to select and electronically download. Unfortunately, storing music on the PC while maintaining 'CD quality' fidelity has required the audio files to be prohibitively large for transferring and saving. MP3 is an audio compression format that enables audio files to be stored and transferred on a computer with a relatively small file size, while still maintaining near perfect fidelity when played back. As an example, a 3 minute song stored as a .wav file at 44KHzZZ takes up about 30MB. However, when compressed in MP3 format the audio file requires only about 3MB of storage, yet still sounds fantastic. As a gauge, t ypically 1 MB is equal to one minute of music. Files compressed in MP3 format can be identified by the .mp3 file type designation. MP3 (short for MPEG-1 Layer 3) is the audio subset of another industry standard referred to as MPEG. It was developed by a group of companies working together as a subgroup of the International Standards Organization (ISO). It became an official standard in 1992 as a part of the MPEG-1 standard. The company primarily associated with MP3 is Fraunhofer Gesellschaft (FhG) in Germany who owns key patents to the technology.