Tips for finding the best free Mp3 audio downloads

When you’re looking for the best free mp3 audio downloads on the Web there are a number of things that you should look out for.  Not all mp3 files are created equal, and some of them may not sound very good or have a complete song on them. 

Often when people find free mp3 audio downloads they discover when they open the file and play it that the song isn’t complete or that the sound quality sounds worse than it would sound on a cassette player played over the telephone and is virtually useless. 

So how can you tell whether or not a free mp3 file that you find online is of decent quality or contains the entire song that you’re looking for and not just the intro to the song or the beginning and end of the song with the middle cut out? Here are some tips for finding high quality free mp3 audio downloads.

Look at the bit rate. Practically all of the information that you need to know about that mp3 is in the bit rate. The bit rate is the number of kilo bytes per second or kbps that the file contains.

When a file has a high kbps number it means that when the mp3 was made the program that was used to make the file used a high compression rate and was able to squish all the song’s information into an mp3 instead of only compressing some of the information which would make the file less high quality. So the higher the kbps rate is on the file the better it will sound. As a general guide think of these common kbps rates when you’re looking at free mp3 files to know how they will sound:

• 8 kbps is about the same quality as an answering machine or voice mail message.

• 96 kbps is about the same quality as you’d hear on a traditional FM radio.

• 124 kbps is the same quality as a traditional CD. Most mp3s have a kbps of 124.

• 194 kbps is ultra high quality digital sound level.

The higher the kbps of a file is the longer it will take download, so if the time that the file takes to download is more important to you than the quality of the sound then you should look for free mp3 audio downloads with a lower kbps rate. If the sound quality of the file is the most important thing to you then look for an mp3 file with the highest kbps rate that you can find.

If you’re looking specifically for high quality free mp3 audio files you should stay away from peer sharing networks unless you check the bit rate very carefully. There are many files on peer sharing networks that are corrupted, or aren’t compressed well, or are just very low quality and if you don’t check the bit rate first you could get an unpleasant surprise when you try to listen a file that you just downloaded.