Who do we blame for this lack of knowledge?

It's really unfortunate how technology has overwhelmed some people to the point where they not only don't know how their stuff works, but they begin to propagate misinformation to others.

I heard someone say that you can only fit 18-20 mp3 songs onto a CD. That caught my attention and of course I jumped into the conversation. No, I countered, depending on the bit rate the mp3 files were encoded in, you can fit 110-140 mp3s onto a CD.

They weren't buying this. The argument I got back was that CD capacity is measured in minutes when it comes to music, not megabytes. Therefore only 80 minutes of music could be put on a CD - which equates to about 15-18 songs.

I patiently explained that while this is true, they were describing the capacity of CD-R when music format is used (which is CD Audio or CDA). This is the same format that music is stored in on a retail music CD. But that's not what we're talking about here. Mp3 files are not standard music files - they're compressed audio and they use roughly one twelfth the space on a CD (assuming 128kbps rate). The reason they were confused as to the number of mp3 songs you could put on a CD is that standard CD burning software converts the mp3 to CDA before putting it on CD - if you choose to make a 'music' CD. If you create a 'data' CD and copy mp3 files over, you will fit over a hundred songs on the disc. They won't play in every audio CD player........ but they will fit on the disc.