Dude, and when we are talking about binary information, there can be no loss.
That's not true, when you go from mp3>wav or even mp3 on your HD to mp3 on a disc a 0 can easily become a 1 and vice versa, these minute errors can pile up and cause a loss of fidelity, regardless of the bitrate. Since there's nothing attached to the mp3 to make sure the that the integrity of the file is maintained, mp3 is considered a "lossy" compression scheme for audio. I'm sure you've heard mp3s that have that weird breakup on the treble that is either due to crappy encoding originally, or too many generations of mp3>whatever>mp3. That technology was invented decades ago, it just wasn't
affordable for everyone. Lol, new?
I was talking about peer to peer applications being new when Napster came out so the files hadn't been circulated as much. But anyway I'm pretty sure mp3 wasn't invented "decades ago". I can imagine some guy in the 60s with a disc of mp3s wishing he had some way to play the thing, and wondering how the hell he encoded it since there was no such thing as PCs. That's funny.