Introduction

New audio compression technologies, such as MP3, allow you to use your computer as a digital jukebox that can hold thousands of CD-quality songs. You can quickly find and play any song with a click of a mouse and never have to worry about tapes wearing out or records getting scratched. Instead of spending hours making tapes or programming a CD changer, you can compile customized playlists in minutes. Audio compression also makes it practical to download music from the Internet, where you can access thousands of songs from artists all over the world. With MP3, you can download a four-minute song in less than 15 minutes (with a 33.6 kbps modem), compared to more than 3 hours for the same song in CD audio format. Now you can sample a wide variety of music from the comfort of your home and find some great music from independent artists you might not otherwise be exposed to.

Music on the Internet

On the Internet, you’ll find music in the form of files that can be downloaded to your computer; music that you can listen to as it’s "streamed" over the Internet (similar to the way you listen to AM and FM radio), and physical media, such as records, tapes and CDs, that you can purchase and have shipped to you. Downloadable music is simply music in the form of a computer file (usually MP3 or WMA format) that you can download from a Web site to your computer. Downloadable music can be played on your computer, a portable digital audio player like the Rio 800, or newer CD players the Rio Volt (www.riohome.com). Streaming audio enables you to listen to digital music without having to wait for the entire file to download. Streaming audio is used by many online music stores to play short clips from songs so you can listen to samples before they you the record or CD. To listen to streaming audio, you need a sound card and an internet connection.

Digital Audio Formats

MP3 (technically, MPEG Audio Layer-III) is a standard format for compressing digital audio. MP3 squeezes audio files to about one tenth of their original size, while maintaining close to CD quality.

RealAudio was the first widely used system for streaming audio and video over the Internet. It is a proprietary format, but it is used by many online music stores for sample clips of songs, and by many Internet radio sites.

WAV is the default format for digital audio on Windows PCs. WAV files usually contain PCM format audio, which means they are uncompressed and take up a lot of space (10MB/minute for CD quality audio).

Windows Media Audio (WMA) is a proprietary format developed by Microsoft. WMA is supported by most full-featured player programs and by many portable players Internet Radio Internet radio is a form of streaming audio, usually in Real Audio or Windows Media Audio format. MP3 can also be streamed, but is more commonly used as a downloadable format.

Spinner (www.Spinner.com) provides a nice tuner interface with access to dozens of stations and programmable presets. Sites like Live365.com and Radio.Sonicnet.com allow you to set up a personal radio station, which you customize by selecting the artists and the types of music you want to hear.

Hardware Requirements

To listen to music on your PC, you need a sound card. To play MP3 files you need at least a Pentium PC (133mHz or faster recommended) or a PowerPC Macintosh. A CD Recordable (CR-R or CD-RW) drive is recommended for recording audio (Redbook format) or MP3 (data format) CDs. You will need plenty of RAM, lots of free disk space, and a modem to download songs or listen to music streamed over the Internet. To convert your existing CDs into MP3 files, you’ll need a CD-ROM drive that is capable of digital audio extraction (DAE)-commonly called ripping.

Software Requirements

To play MP3 files, you need a player program or a portable player that supports MP3. The latest versions of the Windows and Mac operating systems come with built-in players, but you’ll be better off using an all-in-one program like MusicMatch Jukebox (www.musicmatch.com) because it has more features and is easier to use, even for non-technical users MusicMatch Jukebox includes everything you need to create, organize and play MP3 files. MusicMatch supports ripping from CDs, analog recording from records and tapes, and burning MP3 files directly to a CD. MusicMatch also automatically organizes you MP3 files into separate folders by artist, album, genre and other categories. To listen to Internet radio you need a program that supports streaming audio. At the very least, you should install the latest versions of the RealPlayer (www.real.com), Windows Media Player (www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia) and a full-featured audio player, such as MusicMatch Jukebox. These programs will allow you to listen to the majority of Internet radio sites.

Downloading Music

To obtain songs in MP3 format, you can download them from the Internet, create them from prerecorded music or obtain pre-made MP3 CDs. Web sites like MP3.com and EMusic.com offer thousands of downloadable songs in MP3 format. Many of these songs are free, and those that aren’t usually cost only a dollar or so. Napster (www.napster.com) is an MP3 file sharing service that maintains a central directory of shared MP3 files that exist on individual user’s computers. Users search by song title or artist name and Napster displays links to matching files on the computers of other users. Each link lists the file’s resolution and size, and the speed of the user’s Internet connection. The first user then selects and downloads the MP3 file directly from the other user’s computer.

Creating Your Own MP3

Files To create MP3 files from records or tapes you’ll need to record them in real-time, using a sound card. You should use a good stand-alone recording program like Cool Edit 2000 (www.cooledit.com), since the sound recording applications that come with most computers are fairly limited. Cool Edit also has a nice audio clean-up plug-in that can remove clicks, pops and hiss from the sound before you convert it to MP3 or burn it to a CD. When you record using Cool Edit, the song will end up as an uncompressed WAV (pronounced wave). The advantage of a WAV file is that you have the option of editing it to adjust the volume or trim off unwanted silence before it is converted to MP3 or burned to a CD. MusicMatch can also record from analog sources like records and tapes, but lacks the advanced editing features of Cool Edit. WAV files can be recorded directly to an Audio CD or converted to MP3 files. The process of creating an MP3 file is called encoding. Encoding compresses the audio by removing sounds that most people can’t hear. The size and sound quality of the MP3 file is a function of the bit-rate used-the higher the bit-rate, the larger the file and the better the sound quality.

To create MP3 files from an audio CD, the best method is to bypass the sound card and rip the audio directly to your hard disk. Ripping is better than recording through a sound card because it results in a perfect copy without added noise or distortion. Because it is a digital process, ripping is also much faster than recording. For example, a system with a fast CD-ROM drive can rip a four-minute song in less than 30 seconds. Recording the same song through a sound card will always take at least four minutes. Most audio CDs do not contain information, such as artist names and album and song titles. To save you from having to enter this information manually, programs, such as MusicMatch, can automatically get this information from the CDDB (www.cddb.com) and use it to automatically name the files.

Organizing Your Music

Now that you’ve downloaded or created MP3 files, you need a way to organize them. MP3 files can be organized in one big folder that contains all files, or they can be grouped in separate directories with similar music. It’s up to you to decide which method to use, although if you have more than a few hundred songs you should organize them in separate directories. Playlists are optional text files that contain the name and location of each audio file. Each playlist is like a tape with unlimited capacity, where songs can be added, deleted or moved around without the need to re-record the tape. Playlists can be created and read by text editors and programs like MusicMatch.

Playing Your Music

You can play songs from Windows Explorer or Mac Finder by double-clicking on them. If your system is set up properly, this should automatically launch the player software (if it’s not already running). You can also play individual songs by launching the player and using its “File Open” function.If you have created playlists, you can load one into MusicMatch, set the “repeat” mode on, and sit back and enjoy hours of continuous music. You can use the player controls to jump forward or backwards in the list, and you can click on individual songs to play them out of order. MusicMatch’s playlist manager allows you to add, delete and change the order of songs and even save the playlist to a new file.

Recording Your Own CDs

CD recordable drives (CD-R and CD-RW) can be used to record create music CDs with compilations of songs from different albums and to back up data from your computer’s hard disk. CDs are usually recorded in either audio or data formats. Audio format CDs have the advantage of being playable in most CD players, though the capacity is limited to 74 minutes of music (approximately 18 four-minute songs). MP3 files are just data files as far as a CD recorder is concerned, so you will need to record them to a data format CD. With MP3 files, you can record more than 12 hours (about 200 songs) of high-quality music on a single CD, in less than 20 minutes with a 4X CD-R drive. You can also use MusicMatch Jukebox to uncompress MP3 files and record the music to an audio format CD.

For More Information

For more information on recording and playing music on your computer, pick up a copy of The MP3 and Internet Audio Handbook ($19.95) from www.TeamComBooks.com or read it online for free at www.MP3Handbook.com.