MP3 is short for MPEG layer 3. A very powerful compressed audio file format, somewhat like .wav, but highly compressed and offers CD quality sound (44KHz, 16 bit, stereo).
The compression rates are up to 12:1 for CD quality sound, that means that you can store up to 12 hours of music on a single data CD. You can have a full song compressed into small files, without loss of quality, and you can download songs from the Internet. You can listen to a song sample on your hard drive, and if you like it, go out and buy the CD!

It is legal to own a MP3 file, only if you have the CD, or the author’s permission.

MP3 Players are programs written to play MP3 files. There are plenty different kinds of MP3 players, for almost every type of platform.

Skins are files that you can download and install to change the appearance of your MP3 player.

Encoders are a programs that allow your to change your .wav file to a MP3.
Decoders do the opposite. They allow you to change a .mp3 file to a .wav file.
Rippers are the programs that allow you to "rip" a track off a CD and change it to a .wav file.

Recently Diamond Multimedia released a Rio Player. A device that can copy songs from your hard drive to the player, and then play the songs back like a CD player, except it doesn't skip. Look for other devices to follow.

A technique used to capture continuous phenomena, whereby periodic snapshots are taken. If the sampling rate is fast enough, the human sensory organs cannot discern the gaps between each snapshot when they are played back. This is the principle behind motion pictures.
Sampling is the key technique used to digitize analog information. For example, music CDs are produced by sampling live sound at frequent intervals and then digitizing each sample. The samples rate from 8, 16, 32, or 48 kHz. Not all sound cards are able to play back files coded at high sample rates.

ASF is short for Advanced Streaming Format, a streaming multimedia file format developed by Microsoft. It is expected to be an integral part of Windows 98 and eventually replace the older AVI format.

ID3 is basically an ID tag imbedded in MP3 files which contains information about the artist, song name and other similar information.

Compact Disk DataBase, this where the information about CDs is retrieved from, ususally title, artist, and playlist information.

A plug-in is a software module that adds a specific feature or service to a larger system. For example, there are number of plug-ins for the WinAmp player that enable it to display lyrics or even "dancing" 3 dimensional images.