Definition of digital music

music signals that have been converted to numbers that are stored electronically. A musical sound wave is continuous, but it can be represented by numbers that give the amplitude of the wave at each moment in time, as long as the sound is sampled often enough to seem continuous. See sampling rate. A music CD stores sound digitally (as opposed to a traditional vinyl record, which stored sound in analog format by the variations in the groove.) Music files can also be stored on a computer hard disk, but the file representing a song is too large to do this conveniently unless it has been compressed. The development of MP3 compression led to a boom in digital music as people stored music on computer hard disks and digital players such as the iPod. However, rampant file sharing through services such as Napster and Grokster lead to court cases that restricted the use of these services.