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A Song in Your Heart -- And Your Computer Welcome back to the High-Tech Times. This month, I’m going to discuss the newest music phenomenon: MP3. No, this isn’t a fab musical group, but rather one of the hottest topics on the Internet, and the second-most popular search term on Web search engines. MPEG
(Motion Picture Experts Group) is a set of standards for storing and compressing
digital video and audio. MP3 is MPEG Audio Layer 3, which defines how CD-quality
digital audio files are created and stored. If you pop over to Borders
to buy the latest audio CD, what you’re actually getting is a standard
CD-ROM that requires 11 MB of audio data for every minute of songs; that’s
why you can’t get more than an hour of songs on a CD, as the 680 MB of
storage space is used up in around 61 minutes.
But
MP3 files are built differently, requiring only 1 MB/minute, so a single
song or track of 3-5 minutes can easily be downloaded using a 56K modem.
This has resulted in thousands of MP3 Web sites, newsgroups, and FTP (File
Transfer Protocol) sites across the Web, where you can find almost any
song, old or new. How do these MP3 songs compare to a Borders audio CD?
MP3
files are based on psychoacoustics: the way the human brain perceives sound.
Experiments show that not all of the sound we hear is perceived by the
brain. MP3 files start with a standard WAV file, and strip out the parts
that you won’t miss hearing. For example, most people can’t hear sounds
above 16 KHZ, so the MP3 encoder removes that part of the audio signal.
Loud sounds will mask quieter sounds at or near the same frequency, so
those are removed, too. This “whittling” results in a file that sounds
almost identical to the original WAV, but is dramatically smaller.
To
play back an MP3 file, you’ll need a Pentium-class computer with 32 MB
RAM running Windows 95/98, a CD-ROM drive, a 16-bit sound board, and speakers
or headphones. You also need a lot of hard-drive space to store MP3s -
those 3-5 MB per song can fill a hard-drive fast! So budget a few GB on
a separate partition that can be easily defragmented.
The
most important piece of MP3 software is the player, which decodes an MP3
file and outputs the audio through your sound board to your speakers. Many
players offer additional features like spectrum analyzers, equalizers,
frequency displays, etc. A popular feature of some players is the ability
to create your own user interfaces called skins or themes. Most players
also have built-in playlist editors that let you create and save lists
of songs to play. The most popular MP3 players are Winamp and Sonique.
To create your own MP3 files, you’ll need a ripper and an encoder. The
ripper takes a song from the CD and converts it into a WAV file. The encoder
takes the WAV file, strips out extraneous data, and converts it to an MP3.
You can download these applications and many more at <http://www.mpegx.com/topmp3soft.html>.
Creating
your own MP3 files is fairly simple, but a few rules should be followed.
It’s wise to reboot just before you start ripping and encoding; this ensures
you have the most free RAM available. And don’t try to do anything else
at the same time, either, as these are CPU-intensive processes. When you
rip files from an audio CD, experiment to find the best sampling rate.
Click the Options button and look at the defaults. A standard sampling
rate for music is 128 Kb/sec, which works for most music, but I’ve found
that increasing the rate to 160 Kb/sec gives me much better sounds quality
- along with a 25 percent larger file, of course.
Conversely,
if you’re recording audio that doesn’t need high fidelity, you can decrease
the sampling mode down to 80 Kb/sec, or so. This is adequate for spoken-word
recordings (speeches, comedy, etc.) and most 78-rpm records. You’ll be
astonished at how much sound you can squeeze into a megabyte! Oh, and be
sure to delete the original ripped WAV files when you’re done with your
MP3 encoding.
Portable
MP3 players have become the rage this year. The first and best-known of
these players is the Diamond Rio, with 32 MB of on-board RAM for around
$179, and there are several dozen new models with amazing features arriving
every month. The Creative Labs Nomad 64 has, for example, 64 MB of RAM,
an FM radio, and a digital recorder, all in a hand-sized package for around
$250. Once you have encoded your MP3 files on your computer, it’s easy
to download them into a portable player for the most customized form of
song playback.
With
fast connections, you can also stream MP3s from almost any Web site.
In order to send an MP3 file to be played in real?time, you’ll need a way
to let the player know where the file is. The M3U and MP3URL filetypes
were created for this purpose; M3Us are just like RAM files for RealAudio
streaming, and are text files that contain the URL of one or more MP3 files.
To make an M3U, create a simple text file in any text editor (NotePad is
fine), and enter a URL such as <http://www.catii.com/stream/mymp3file.mp3>
(note this isn’t a working URL), and save it as mymp3file.m3u. That's it!
You now can stream the file over a network.
A
lot has been said about the legality of MP3 files. MP3 files aren’t illegal
just because they’re MP3s, but there are many files that violate copyrights
and are, therefore, not legal. If you created an MP3 of the latest hit
CD and posted it to the Web without the owner’s permission, you would be
guilty of a federal crime, a violation of the No Electronic Theft (NET)
Act of 1997 which makes it a felony to create or distribute unauthorized
digital music. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is
the watchdog organization for this kind of abuse.
As
a result of all this federal attention, most large MP3 sites distribute
only legal and authorized MP3 files. These sites let you download a huge
number of files from thousands of artists. If you like the music, you can
buy the CD or the song, like shareware. If you want to load legal MP3s,
stick with Web sites that have a reputation for authorized MP3 files; you
can’t always tell if a track is legal just by looking at it.
The
most popular MP3 site is <www.mp3.com> which gets over a million hits
a day. MP3.com has a large collection of free files for downloading, as
well as MP3 utilities. You should note that nearly all materials posted
on newsgroups is illegal, but you can often locate specific songs by browsing
groups like <alt.binaries.music.mp3> and <alt.binaries.sounds>. You
can also use search engines like Lycos and AltaVista to locate songs using
standard search criteria.
Some
of the best things in life are free, and MP3 music is one of them. See
you next month.
See
you next month.
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