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The MP3 lies at the heart of important debates around intellectual property and file-sharing, but it is also a cultural artifact in its own right. This article examines the design of the MP3 from both industrial and psychoacoustic perspectives in an attempt to understand why MP3s are so easy to exchange, and the auditory aspects of the exchange process. As a container technology for recorded sound, the MP3 shows that the quality of “portability” is central to the history of auditory representation. As a psychoacoustic technology that can literally play its listeners, the MP3 shows that digital audio culture works according to a somewhat different logic from digital visual culture.