Downloading music files from the Internet is a very powerful and cheap method to distribute music. The music industry as we know it will fade away when more artists publish their music in electronic form. This new business model is supported by a new generation of music companies and software. Today it is possible to send money directly to the artist, bypassing the whole traditional music industry. Artists normally only get just a few percent of the sales profit, now they can get the whole amount.

MP3 format is basically a compression format that was invented to answer the need for smaller file sizes, so that all this can be made possible.

However, the MP3 encoding scheme is dependent upon the quality of the digitized sample made using traditional sampling technologies (which means that its quality can only go as  far as the sampling quality by which it was made).  Additionally, its compression algorithm further reduces the quality of sound, so rich music containing high frequency harmonics and small nuances get completely distorted and lost in MP3 format.
 

The music quality of an MP3 file gets lower because of many factors.

• MP3 requires a very good quality & expensive Analog to Digital converter to provide it with a good enough input to begin with. Using low quality Analog to Digital converters results in a much lower quality MP3 file, because the MP3 format further reduces the quality of the resulted digitized wave from its original. 

• Was MP3 set to encode at a low bit-rate? The bit-rate of an MP3 file indicates the amount of music information stored in the file, it is expressed in Kilobits per second (Kbps). If the bit-rate is lower than 96 Kbps you will probably hear some imperfections. If you are a music professional, or have a musical piece that is very complex (like classical music), you need to use at least 128 Kbps. Remember these figures when you see the WaveTrace online demo!

• Or was it because of a bad encoder? The program used to encode the file can be the reason. MP3 files sound bad if the quality of the encoder is low. Some encoders produce low quality MP3 files, but they can do it very fast. 

• Perhaps a bad CD-ROM? CD-ROM players sometimes have problems reading an Audio-CD. This is due to a technical flaw in the Audio-CD standard that does not include a synchronization signal. It takes a good implementation of "direct digital extraction" in the CD-ROM to overcome this.

We believe that the MP3 format will slowly fade away and make room for better and more advanced methods of capturing and storing music.

WaveTrace is exactly what everybody is still looking for. Eventually as more and more companies support this technology, we believe WaveTrace will replace the popular but clumsy MP3 format.

Fortunately enough, WaveTrace answers all these problems MP3 was invented for and it does it directly from the Analog input! No more dependency on low quality Analog to Digital converters or expensive equipment!

WaveTrace can reproduce an Analog wave EXACTLY as  intended, with its high frequency harmonics and intended noise and all this is done using a much smaller file size than anything seen before in the Analog to Digital world!

I believe you are now ready for the WaveTrace demo, we hope you will enjoy the experience!