mp3s

[wiggins]

OK Enough! I keep hearing about them in school. What are Mp3s? How do you download them? Where can you get Mp3s by commercial music artists like Andy Hunter, Audio Adrenaline, and Rebecca St. James?

[Technomancer]

mp3 is a particular audio compression standard that allows fairly good compression while still retaining quality. Basically, it allows one to shrink audio (music) files down to a manageable size for internet transfers.

As for downloading mp3s, unless the artist/record label has specifically made them available free of charge, it would be piracy.

[wiggins]

Then how do you get mp3s from them? Buy the cds and use some sort of format converter?

[Mithrandir]

You can 'rip' audio tracks from CDs, yes. Google on 'MP3 Ripping Software' and see what you can find.

[Technomancer]

As long as CD ripping is for personal use from legallly obtained media it's alright owing to 'Fair Use' provisions that exist under most legal regimes (except possibly the US, owing to DMCA)

[Fsiphskilm]

man, you're behind.

[shooraijin]

There are also standards like Ogg Vorbis which have the advantage of being open source through-and-through, although BladeEnc and LAME have helped get away from the Thomson hegemony.

One thing that does need to be pointed out is that MP3 encoding is destructive, e.g., you don't get the same level of audio detail from your music when the final conversion is released, even though the idea is to make a true perceptual copy so that it *appears* nothing is gone (assisted with higher bit rates). Nevertheless, you can never get those dropped audio segments back, and depending on the encoder, this can hurt. Furthermore, if you work with high-end audio, not only is there an added computational penalty with converting back and forth between MP3, but it also costs in terms of quality reduction (especially if the conversion must happen multiple times back and forth to process the audio stream). In my case with my CDs I've ripped, I just leave them uncompressed as .aiff unless I have a compelling reason to crush them, as they will sound exactly the same as the disc without any worries of reduction in quality from compress/decompress cycles. This is one of the advantages of having a 'huge' hard disk.

[Technomancer]

It's a lossy compression scheme, but I haven't had any noticeable problems with it. You can write an mp3 to an ordinary audio CD without audible distortion, although if you're compressing and recompressing the signal you will lose data each time. I'm speaking from the point of view of recreational use here however. All of the audio files involved in my research are left as uncompressed PCM .wav files (which runs to a lot of CDs for back ups).

[shooraijin]

There's been a few encoders I've dealt with, even at allegedly "high" bitrates, where I either hear frank distortion in the signal, or echoing. On the other hand, I'm really sensitive to audio imperfections, so I'm probably a lot pickier than the audience at large, and I'll cheerfully admit that I have a lot higher audio resolution requirements than most. Since it seems so encoder-dependent, though, I'd rather not take the risk of suboptimal sound

Still, MPEG audio is certainly a cut above, say, RealPlayer codecs and such.

[Technomancer]

That could be, I've only ever used Cool Edit Pro 2 for handling mp3 encoding (which I have access to because of my work), which is generally meant for professional work anyways.

[wiggins]

So... why are mp3s so popular??? o_O

[Mithrandir]

As long as CD ripping is for personal use from legallly obtained media it's alright owing to 'Fair Use' provisions that exist under most legal regimes (except possibly the US, owing to DMCA)

To the best of my knowledge, they are protected in the US under a different act, the name of which escapes me. It's the "Legal Backup" act (Someone wanna give me a name for it, here?)

However, I have heard that if you are in Austrailia, you can't even make a 'legal' backup of any music you own. To/From any media.

As for why they are so popular - If I take my CD player on a road trip, I get approx 80 minutes of audio tops. If I take my (say 40 GB iPod) mp3 player that's about 75 HOURS of music.

The amount of time you spend ripping the MP3s, however, may make it less enticing. Enter kazaa. While I won't comment to the legality of it, there are some MP3s that I have downloaded, just because I was too lazy to go all the way out to my car, remove the carosoul, extract the CD, bring it back inside and rip it. It was quicker to DL it from a web page somewhere. If the song was not in MP3 format, it would have taked about 10-20 times longer to download it, making it impractical.

Thats why I think MP3s are so popular.

My $0.02

[Master Kenzo]

Here's a bit of imformation about the uses of MP3s:

Downloading Legal MP3s: If you want to get some *legal* mp3s of (some) Christian artists, check out ZPoC...there are many srtists that support this free trading software.

MP3-CD players: Also, there are MP3-CD players that are becoming more and more popular. Basically, you burn a CD with, say, 150 MP3s on it, stick it in the player and you can play it. Most have "Display" and can read ID3 tags (for title, copyright date, etc. inside the MP3 file) and can search by album. Two years ago I bought one for $250.

iPods: If you have a lot of money to spend, invest in an iPod. Don't buy more than you'll need though. For instance, there is 10GB, 20GB, and 40GB. I recommend the 20GB because it comes with all sorts of awesome stuff (headphones, dock, usb2, etc.) that the 10GB doesn't have. If you have a large collection of MP3s, invest in a 40GB. I don't have an iPod, but I've done a lot of research and hope to get one in the near future. I'm very sure the price is going to drop, so if you hang tight with these things, they'll be a lot cheaper (hopefully) soon. Currently the 20GB is $599.

SHOUTcast: This free software is run on a server and can be connected to from a player such as Winamp and you can listen to MP3 streamed from a server.

*All prices are in CDN (Canadian Dollars)

Technical Specs of MP3:
Bitrate -> Actual filesize (kilobytes per second)
Highest Quality (BEWARE: High filesizes result from this, but the sound is excellent)
320kbps -> 40kbs
256kbps -> 32kbs
196kbps -> 24.5kbs
128kbps -> 16kbs (The standard bitrate, good balance between quality and filesize - sounds great with most songs)
92kbps -> 11.5kbs
64kbps -> 8kbs
56kbps -> 7kbs
24kbps -> 3kbs
Lowest Quality (BEWARE: Although this will get you the smallest file, the result is horrible)

* Not tested, this is all theory Not all possible bitrates are included.

Well, I know that's a long post, but I pick up a lot of information on the road. Sorry about the long loading times

[righteous_slave]

MP3.com has a large number of Christian artists, some of the bigger names will put a new track up for free for a short period of time, or only have tracks that you can listen to not download. Type the name of your favorite artists in the search box and see if they have anything up. Or look through the diferent genres, find the spiritual division of the genre, look through, check out the artists web site to make sure they are what they appear to be (spiritual doesn't alwasy mean Christian) and find a new favorite

[Mithrandir]

If you want it to be 'legal' when you download an MP3, you can just buy it off iTunes (apple.com) for 99 cents. Or you can buy a can of pepsi (after their superbowl add) or you can buy something from Mc Donalds. Both Pepsi and McDonalds are running promotions starting early next year (sooner in test locations) where they will GIVE AWAY songs from Apple's iTunes store. No word yet on whether it's ANY song you want, or just a SPECIFIC song (probably one that doesn't sell well). In any event, both Pepsi and McDs are paying the full 99 cents for each song. A surprise, when you consider that Apple usually makes incredible deals for bulk purchases (easily done, considering they have the highest margins in the industry. 60+%).