I will confess to some hypocrisy as I write this. My music collection, some purchased from www.emusic.com, and some ripped from CD’s, is exclusively in the MP3 format. The ubiquity of that type of compression makes it an ideal choice for storing music files, since I can play them on my Discman, in my private Flash jukebox, or on just about any operating system. Still, the MPEG layer-3 format is plagued by a few problems.

Besides a compression algorithm that has been bested by a few newcomers, like AAC (think iTunes), MP3 is also a patented format that requires licensing from the Fraunhofer Institute for encoding and decoding. Because of this, most free Linux distributions, including Debian and its derivatives, do not include support for MP3 playback ‘out-of-the-box’.

The music on this site is available for free in MP3 format, but it is also available in the freely-licenced, open-source Ogg Vorbis format as an alternative. Not only is Ogg Vorbis unencumbered by legal requirements, its sound quality is also at least as good or better than MP3 at similar bitrates.

So consider trying out the Ogg Vorbis version of the music here. There is an installer for Windows codecs (version 0.71) that will allow you to play Ogg files using Windows Media Player.