Originally posted by Incidents Happen
> i always thought you had to download it onto wav. , then burn it onto a cd on wav to have the same quality.

and if you burn it on mp3, the swoosh factor doesnt allow it to be re-formatted to wav.

thats just what i have heard

That is correct, if you wish to retain the pure quality of your audio file you don't want to export to MP3 and use that file. MP3 is a lossy compression, once its compressed you can turn it back into .wav, but only at the same sound quality of the MP3. It isn't like a .zip file where you can compress it, decompress it and all the data remains the same.

So, if you want a small file to send to a friend online, its fine to convert to MP3 to keep size down, but if you want to keep your quality keep it in wav format, which can be burned on a CD and ripped back off it again and keep the same quality.