>How come some people dislike MP3s so much (are they like songs >played on AM radio compared to FM?).

An MP3 is a "compressed" version of a .wav file. Bits of information are removed from the file to make it smaller.

I guess the prferred format would depend on what you are doing. If you wanna listen on an iPod, the MP3 will do but if you want to hear a recording in all it's original sonic glory, you need the .wav file. ( sometimes reads as .cda file on a commercial cd )

Most people don't like live shows to be compressed to MP3 format, especially in the trading community, because it degrades the gene pool.

A 60 Mb .wav file will be converted to maybe 10Mb as an MP3 so somethings gotta go.

A 700 Mb cd will hold 80 minutes of music in .wav file format but over 10 hours in MP3 format.

MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3, more commonly referred to as MP3, is a popular digital audio encoding and lossy compression format, designed to greatly reduce the amount of data required to represent audio, yet still sound like a faithful reproduction of the original uncompressed audio to most listeners. It was invented by a team of European engineers who worked in the framework of the EUREKA 147 DAB digital radio research program, and it became an ISO/IEC standard in 1991.