ASCAP

American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers.

bandwidth

A measure of how much information can be carried by a particular device.

burning

Writing data to a CD.

CD-R disc

A read-only CD.

CD-RW disc

A CD that can be erased and rewritten.

CD-R/RW drive

A drive that can write to CD-R and CD-RW discs.

codec

A program for compressing and decompressing data.

converter

Software program to transform one file format to another.

digital

System using binary numbers (0 and 1) to store data.

download

To copy a file from a server to your computer.

EQ

Adjusting the treble, bass, midrange volume.

FTP

File Transfer Protocol. Program used to copy files between computers.

KBPS

Kilobytes per second; one thousand bits per second.

lossless

File compression in which no data is lost.

lossy

File compression that looses some data to reduce the size of a file.

media player

A program to play audio and video files.

MIDI

(Musical Instrument Digital Interface. Essentially, a digital sheet-music version of a tune.

MP3

Short for MPEG-1, Layer 3, the most popular format for digital music; also, generically used to signify any type of digital music format.

normalize

Making the volume of a number of songs the same.

P2P

Person to person.

playlist

A list of songs to listen to.

quantize

Setting music to an exact tempo and time signature.

RIAA

Recording Industry Association of America.

spoofing

Practice by anti-piracy sources to thwart downloading free songs by making fake copies on P2P networks.

streaming

Real-time audio/video transmission.

track

A song on a dvd, mp3 player.

USB

Universal Serial Bus that allows for high rates of data transfer.

WAV

An uncompressed Windows audio file; aka wave.