What is Bitrate? and what does it do?

bitrates dont onley appy to audo/video files...eg your internet connection (if your on dial up) is about 50 kbps or 50,000 bits per second. dsl gos at 512 kbps minimum.

a home network runs at about 100mb a second ,thats 100 million bits per second. keep in mind that there are 8 bits in a byte. so 100mb a second is about 12.5 mB a second (bits is abreveiated with a lowercase b and bytes with a capital B)

and as for music...i find 128 kb/s extremeley low qualety and IMO un useable. if im stuck with mp3s i go for a bitrate of at least 192 , but 224 , 256 ,and 320 kbps are the best sound qualety so i go for them over the 192 . but even a 320 kb/s mp3 can sound bad if you listen carfuley so if i can find one i allways go for a WAV file . WAV files run at the exact same bitrate as a cd wich is exactley 1411kb/s giving you no loss in sound qualety AT ALL from the origanal CD. there are allso other formats (.flac, .ape, ale, wma, shn etc)that give you the best of boath worlds (compression to save space and sound qualety exactley the same as the origanal CD) these files run at about 800-1200kb/s . wav and the other files i just metioned are all called "lossless" files. mp3 and normal wmas ,ogg ,m4a etc are all called "lossy" because they compromize the sound qualety to get the file size so small.

google bitrates and ul find out anything els i may have missed or not gotten right.