Rip, Dump, Mix, Fix, Cut, Burn, Share and Play: Tools for Your Personal Music
- Online Music Providing Services
- Online Music Providing Services
- CD Burning Software
- CD Ripping Software
- Portable Audio CD Players
- Media Player Software
- Audio Mixer Software
- Audio Editing Software
- Audio Transcoding Software
- Internal Flash Memory Music Players
- Removable Flash Memory Music Players
- Hard-drive Based Music Players
You know digital music has gone mainstream when my 72-year-old Grandpa Mo starts talking about his online music accounts. He listens to his personal selections while he sports grandma to her hair appointments and gym dates in his Lincoln Continental. He's been alternating between the best-selling DiVinci Code audio book he downloaded from Audible.com and a couple of the latest Norah Jones singles he picked up from Napster 2.0.
Grandpa Mo is a far cry from the original peer-to-peer pirates who pioneered the online digital music industry (and who must have napped through a couple of lessons on stealing while they were in kindergarten). Since the demise of the original Napster, the online music industry has retooled and the medium's first major growing pain may turn out to be a boon for the rest of us. The post-Napster-lawsuit shakeout may be a good thing for artists, music aficionados and honest digital music lovers everywhere.
Tons of (legal) choices now exist to find and download songs from a huge selection of artists and genres. New independent labels are springing up all the time and wide-ranging communities of music-lovers are using the virtual digital music medium to stay in touch with each other and their favorite artists. The artists themselves don't even need a record label any more to gain a following and sell (or just give away) a ton of songs and CDs.
The computer industry is involved as well, with Apple making a bid to be the leader in choice and quality with its iTunes and iPod offerings. Microsoft is touting enhanced digital security measures and rock-solid partnerships with mega-distributors such as WalMart. Hardware manufacturers are also in the game, cranking out portable digital music players at a brisk pace.
Even the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), which patrols the digital frontier for song bandits, is on-board, with digital music dissemination. Of course, the RIAA wants you to know that grandpa could still get busted if he doesn't stay legit.
Grandpa Mo is less concerned these days about getting arrested for piracy than he is about where he can get the best deal on some new Coldplay or some classic Miles. He wants to be a good citizen, but he still wants the best price, top selection and a format that offers quality and compatibility with his computer and his portable player. He wants to take his existing CD collection and rip it to his hard drive, make custom compilations, burn new CDs and load them up on his portable players. So how's he supposed to handle all the options?
MP3 vs. WMA vs. AAC
First let's talk formats, but Grandpa Mo hates techno-babble, so we'll try to keep it pretty simple. Take your average music CD and we'll call that high-quality (although some audiophiles would argue with you). The quality is good, but the file size is huge since the digital encoding is rather inefficient, meaning that the file size is large. That's fine on a hour-long disc with 640 MB of space, rather than on a little portable digital music player with only 64 MB. Even a computer hard drive can run out of room fairly quickly with digital music.
MP3 was the first highly compressed digital music format. MP3 (MPEG-1, layer 3) is the original, tried-and-true, mass-adopted, downloadable, portable, digital music standard. One minute of WAV audio is about 10 MB of disk space. One minute of MP3 audio is about 1 MB space. It was MP3 technology, as much as the Napster peer-to-peer networking phenomenon, that sparked the digital music rage, as early adopters and college students everywhere took up the cause. MP3 is still a pervasive online format and much of the music you can purchase, trade or otherwise acquire online comes in the MP3 format.
Microsoft weighed in with its digital music format in 2001 when it introduced Windows Media Audio (WMA). WMA has a smaller file size (compared to MP3) and works with enhanced Microsoft digital copyright enhancements. This makes it popular with some of the larger record labels and it is the format of choice for some online music sites.
In the Spring of 2003, Apple Computer introduced iTunes and added a whole slew of online music options, centered around offering single songs for 99-cents. Now everyone is doing the per-song download model. But instead of MP3 or WMA, Apple embraced a compression standard called AAC. It is not a new standard, and everyone seems to have an opinion about the merits of MP3 vs. WMA vs. AAC. Each has its champions and detractors. It's a little bit like the Windows vs. Macintosh debate, and as I advised Grandpa Mo when he asked me about it: What do you already have? What brand do you like? What screen are you most comfortable with? That's a good place to start.
One word of caution, or disclaimer, is that each of these compression formats is not as high-quality as the original audio source. They say they sound "almost" like a CD, and they do: almost. But the compression is also why they fit on those portable players, which makes it all worthwhile.
MP3 Players
When you are comparing players, some things to consider include compatibility, storage capacity, battery life, size and, of course, price. The Apple iPod ($390) and iPod Mini ($250), for example, are built for use with the iTunes download site, with 4-20 GB capacities with no option for expansion. They play back AAC, MP3 and WAV formats (no WMA). So far, the iPod is the only player that plays the AAC format and the iTunes site is the only place to get AAC songs. It's the Apple way.
The original MP3 players, of which there are many, are probably best represented by the original Rio players ($99-$289), originally manufactured by Diamond Multimedia (now by Digital Networks). These players all use flash memory cards of one sort or another to allow unlimited memory expansion, although they usually come stock with 32-128 MB of internal memory. These players are considerably less expensive because they have considerably less storage space to start with.
Battery life is something that you might not think of until it's too late. Some of today's players come with proprietary rechargeable lithium ion batteries. These can be expensive to replace when they die in a few years. It is hard to predict how smart it was to put a non-removable battery in the iPods. Other players use AA and AAA batteries. They may burn out quicker, but at least they are easier to replace.
Jukebox, Ripping and Burning Software
Before you can get your music into a portable player, you need to get it onto your computer. Some aficionados go so far as to catalog their entire CD collections on computer. It is a straightforward matter to cable your computer to your home audio system using mini-stereo to RCA cable adapters. The best way to manage your online jukebox collection is using a software jukebox player. MusicMatch and Real Jukebox are two of the most popular products in this category.
To get your CD collection onto computer requires a simple piece of software called a CD ripper. These software products, available at any number of shareware sites for around $20, convert CD audio to MP3, WAV, WMA or AAC so you can use them as you would any downloaded file. A ripper is usually included with jukebox software.
Download Music Without Getting Arrested
Click for a complete listing of these services:
Web Music Hosting and Sharing Services
The (in)famous RIAA crackdown on illegal file sharing just goes to show how far the industry will go to quell unauthorized audio sharing activities. This doesn't mean there aren't a whole host of legitimate ways to upload and download files.
Kazaa
Kazaa is peer-to-peer sharing software that relies on users allowing pop-up ads. Users install the Kazaa Media Desktop and become connected to the peer-to-peer network.
Peer-to-peer (P2P) simply means that individual users connect to each other directly, without a central point of management. Kazaa Media Desktop will connect you to other KMD users.
For example Grandpa Mo downloads Kazaa Media Desktop and installs it onto his computer. Across the country, Uncle Ernie, has also installed Kazaa on his computer. Grandpa Mo uses Kazaa to search for a file he is looking for. Kazaa finds the file on Ernie's computer. Grandpa can now download the file directly from Ernie.
With P2P networks like Kazaa, security and copyright are of utmost importance and the RIAA has targeted Kazaa much as it did Napster. It is therefore important to ensure that you carefully choose which files you want to share so you don't share files that you do not own the copyright. And you probably don't own the copyright to anything that is not your own original creation. Kazaa skates around the piracy issue by putting the ethics in the hands of users to "not share files you don't have the rights for."
Kazaa Media Desktop users do have the opportunity to get high quality, professional files from content providers and creators through Altnet technology. Ordinary Kazaa searches will turn up Altnet audio, music, games, software and video files. A Gold icon indicates the file is available through Altnet Premium for a price.
Altnet files are digitally rights managed ("DRM-protected"). Most of them can be previewed for a set length of time so that you can see whether it is something you would like to own. At the end of the trial period, you'll be prompted with information about purchasing the file. Each file will have its own individual pricing and license agreement from the content owner.
Wrap
The world of digital music is young and still evolving rapidly. There is no question that it offers unprecedented access to music and content from the widest variety of sources ever available. Casual users can download songs to listen to at the gym or, like Grandpa Mo, to listen to while he runs errands around town. More avid enthusiasts can rip and catalog their CD collections to play on their digital audio jukeboxes. If you are an artist yourself, there's never been an easier way to distribute your music directly to listeners. Whatever your interests, if you have a little knowledge and some equipment, digital audio is well within your grasp.
Jim Mikles is a freelance technology writer and a digital media enthusiast.
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