To cut a long story short, MPEG layer 3 does to audio files what JPEG did to graphics files. MPEG is a file format designed for compressing animations and video, and MPEG layer three is the part of that format which is used to compress the audio stream.

All of the samples presented here are in MPEG layer 3 format as it provides the smallest files with the best quality. And no, that isn't just in my opinion!

The down side is that it's a relatively new format, so some people may not have the ability to play it yet. It's rapidly becoming the new standard for audio, though, so if your software is reasonably up to date you could get a pleasant surprise if you try.

If you don't have any software to play the samples yet, try the Winamp site for both MS Windows and Macintosh machines.

Sample Quality

The demo was professionally produced in a studio and then released as a CD. These samples have been taken as direct grabs from the CD. The full song(s) were then compressed into MPEG-3 format without any further alteration. The short samples were reduced to 22kHz mono first in the interest of getting the download time down. The only additional editing I have done to the samples is to fade out the volume at the end of the short samples.

The short samples are 22kHz mono 16 bit, compressed as a 56 kb/s MPEG stream. In layman's terms, this is roughly somewhere between Medium Wave radio and FM mono quality. The samples generally run from the start of the song up to the first chorus.