ound. The goal of the MP3 format is to compress a CD-quality song by a factor of 10 to 14 without losing the CD quality of the sound. With MP3, a 32 megabyte song on a CD compresses down to 3 megabytes or so. This lets you download a song in minutes rather than hours, and it lets you store hundreds of songs on your computer's hard disk without taking up that much space. If you wanted to, you could download an MP3 file, expand it back to its original size and then record it on a write-able CD so you could play it in the CD player in your car. All that you are doing is converting back and forth between different formats to make downloading easier.
             MP3 files are not illegal. What is illegal is taking copyrighted music from an artist's CD, encoding it in the MP3 format to make it smaller and then giving that music away for free on the Internet without the artist's permission. That violates copyright laws and also cheats the artist.
             Is it possible to compress a song without hurting its qual
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