Mp3 eejit's guide please. N.B btw.

[Dave1258]

Mp3 eejit\'s guide please. N.B btw.

Would one of you techno guys please give me a simple guide to MP3 how it works and what you need to use it. I am sure I really need it/want it but not sure how to go about buying a player ( if that's the right word) or how to get the music on the thing in the first place.


Regards Dave

<hr width=100% size=1> A man should have two things in life, a boat and a wife willing to let him have one.<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1>Edited by Dave1258 on 08/10/2004 21:11 (server time).</FONT></P>

 

[boatless]

Re: Mp3 eejit\'s guide please. N.B btw.

Dave, Hi

Start here http://www.musicmatch.com and use that. With it you can then "rip" your cd collection onto your hard drive, from there, you can play it through Jukebox, or load it onto your mp3 player (have a look at the iRiver) which outdoes the iPod by a country mile.

Once you've done that, pm me for more tips.

I have about 3,000 songs on this machine, which play wirelessly around the house on an FM frequency.

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[BrendanS]

Re: Mp3 eejit\'s guide please. N.B btw.

Depends how you have your music stored at the moment. If MP3 then quite easy,. If in other formats then a bit more difficult,. Wot you want to do?

<hr width=100% size=1>Me transmitte sursum, caledoni

 

[ShipsWoofy]

Another long one, but hopefully helpful

Thought I would have a stab at this….

MP3 is basically a compression algorithm for audio, in a similar way that jpeg is a compression algorithm for photographs.

It is a standard, which means it can be played on any system that can play MP3 compressed audio.

An analogue CD stores digital sound as 1’s and 0’s, pits in the CD surface are read by a laser, ok, not trying to teach the art of sucking eggs. This data is then converted by the computer in the cd player, PC etc into sound. You could consider for purposes of explanation that each music track is a computer program. A three minute audio track will take up approximately 30 MB of space on a CD.

When you do the maths, a 700MB CD (as big as they get) will hold 23 three minute tracks or thereabouts. Hence these best of albums tend to have around 20 tracks of radio play length.

The MP3 format aims to compress these audio ‘programs’ by a factor of around 10, so a three minute track now becomes 3MB. 700/3 = 233 tracks of ‘near’ audio quality.

Like jpg compression there is a price, squash too much and you start to lose quality, not enough and you don’t get many tracks onto each CD. The compression rate is determined by samples per second. If I understand correctly, a hum at a constant pitch and frequency will compress to nearly zero, the algorithm samples once and says yes, this is the same sound for two minutes. An audio CD will have 2 minutes worth of data, even though it is all the same.

Throughout the track the MP3 is collecting together similar sounds, removing spaces, sampling volume etc. When played back the computer reads the MP3 track and puts it all back together as an audio track and it sound very very similar. There is a lot more to the compression technique, but I actually have very little interest in the theory.

Back to samples, the more samples the MP3 makes the more changes of tone and frequency it will record, the less and bits start to get left out, a one note change on a classic piece might get missed. HiFi buffs will argue until they are crawling gasping for breath that MP3 is the destruction of music as we know it, and in some cases they have a point. But the beauty of the system is down to the environment and the human ear.

We often don’t notice the little bits that are missing from an MP3, we are listening to it over the computer fan, through headphones on the train or in the car for example. Our hearing range is actually quite poor and as we get older it reduces, so it is more likely that kids will hear the difference long before adults, which is quite ironic really.

So in comes the compression factor of 10:1. Which equates to around 112 to 128 kbs (kilo bits per second). This is an ample setting for most uses, though I would up it for classical music. An audio CD samples at 44,100 (441kbs) *2, 16 bit is stereo or 2 channel. So along with the compression there is also much less sampling going on. But very few people will notice the difference.

Ripping

You may have heard of people ripping tracks, all this means quite simply is converting and audio track to an MP3. This requires a piece of software, a search on google will throw up many, and boatless mentioned two.

Micronsoft media player is a bit poo. In many cases if you rip the audio it will only play back on your computer due to copyright issues, not great if you wanted to play it on your laptop, you can of course insert the original CD into the laptop to prove ownership to media player, but that kinda goes against the whole point really.

Music match is a great piece of software, but in its shareware guise is too limited, its ripping speed is restricted, and I think it will only rip one track at a time, so you have to sit there for about 20 minutes per CD.

My preference is winamp, which I believe also has better control of ID3 tags (hang on).

ID3 TAGS

Along with the music track, MP3 also allows users to include track and album data, this will be displayed in many players, my boat stereo will show the track details, album name, genre, year, artist etc. But only if this data is saved within the MP3 file. Winamp and most other rippers will actually download most of this info from the internet when you insert the audio CD. Though you may wish to edit some of it. I find winamp has an easy to understand tag editor, but I also use a program called abandoner tag control as it can be easier for batch editing.

Players.

MP3’s can be played on a variety of devices, it began life on computers but companies quickly realised that this was an ideal format for people on the move and solid state players started to appear. These would have flash memory as used in digital camera’s. the drawback being to write more tracks you would often have to delete some to make space.

MP3 personal CD’s then began to appear. This meant you would write the MP3 tracks to a CDR (233 tracks) and play that, just changing the CD for more tracks. I estimate now around 13 - 16 normal albums to a CDR.

Then came the car CD / MP3 players ( I have one on board). Brilliant, I will be able to have my whole CD collection on board with around 75 CDR’s. The car player I have as said will read the ID3 tags which means not having the cases to refer to is not such a bind.

FYI the player I am using on board is a goodmans with remote control from argos, £79.99, excellent. In the boat environment, MP3 quality is quite ample, it is hardly a good auditorium.

The latest fad is the iPOD, which is a solid state player, but has a whopping 40GB of storage, or approx 13,500 three minute tracks. (if my maths is correct). Or around 57 CDr worth.

So there you have it, I hope this brings you a little more up to speed. Just think about having all your music on board with you, taking up just a big CD type wallet.

Excellent.

Hope this helps.


<hr width=100% size=1><A target="_blank" HREF=http://www.topcatsail.co.uk>Woof</A>

 

[Dave1258]

Re: Another long one, but hopefully helpful

Yes thanks Woof,..your explanation is fantastic, I have a lot of music stored on my computer, as you say that's where MP3's began, so therefore how do I transfer these audio files from the PC..to a MP3 player, if that is possible?

<hr width=100% size=1> A man should have two things in life, a boat and a wife willing to let him have one.

 

[BrendanS]

Re: Another long one, but hopefully helpful

Yes, when you buy an MP3 player, it will typically connect to the pc via a USB port. You use simple file managers to pick which albums or tracks you want to download to the player. You can do this as often as you want so if you have a huge collection of music that won't fit on the mp3 player in one go, you can change what you've downloaded whenever you want.

<hr width=100% size=1>Me transmitte sursum, caledoni

 

[BrendanS]

Re: Another long one, but hopefully helpful

As you have a lot of music stored on your computer, attached is a link to an absoutely essential bit of free software for any music buff.

It will allow you to play your nice clean digitial recordings, as though they were actually old vinyl records. You can specify parameters as how much dust is on the record, how old and worn the record is, and how many and how deep the scratches are, as well as adding mechanical and electrical noise, and also specify how old the record player itself is (1970's, 1930's phonogram etc) /forums/images/icons/laugh.gif

<A target="_blank" HREF=http://www.izotope.com/products/audio/vinyl/>http://www.izotope.com/products/audio/vinyl/</A>

<hr width=100% size=1>Me transmitte sursum, caledoni

 

[Geoffs]

Re: Another long one, but hopefully helpful

Why on earth does anyone want to make digital music sound like an old vinyl, beyond me.

I'll try and develop a piece of software that makes broadband behave like the good old dial up days!

<hr width=100% size=1>Old Chinese proverb 'Man who sail boat into rice field, soon get into paddy'

 

[BrendanS]

Re: Another long one, but hopefully helpful

It's actually for professional sound engineers - people doing stuff for films etc, but the idea did amuse me!

<hr width=100% size=1>Me transmitte sursum, caledoni

 

[BrendanS]

Re: How to rant! Absolute classic!

Talking of making broadband run like dial up. Reminded me of this piece.I even bookmarked it, it made me laugh so much. It's the epitome of how to rant professionally. Pithy witty and pointed

<A target="_blank" HREF=http://www.sunpig.com/martin/archives/2003/09/07/bt_midband_just_like_ordinary_dialup_only_without_the_good_bits_part_1/>BT Midband: Just like ordinary dial-up, only without the good bits Part 1</A>

and then
<A target="_blank" HREF=http://www.sunpig.com/martin/archives/2003/09/08/bt_midband_just_like_ordinary_dialup_only_without_the_good_bits_part_2/>part 2</A>
Just get this bit. I howled!

Stupid installation tricks
When a BT engineer upgrades your phone line to ISDN, they will leave behind an installation CD. A few days later, you'll get another CD through the post, this one purely for the Midband product that rides on top of ISDN.

All the installation documents exhort you to install all the software from the first CD, and then all the software from the second one. If you deviate from these instructions, fire and brimstone will rain down upon the land, your children will become barren, and all your pets will start howling and butting their heads against the walls until they bleed from their eyeballs and make a mess all over your carpet.

In the case of troubleshooting, the first question the FAQs and support documents ask is "Have you installed CD 1, and then CD 2?"

Care to guess what's the first step of the CD 2 installation process?

It gets you uninstall all the software packages that were installed from CD 1. It warns you sternly that if you fail to do so, your midband connection may not work.

Yes, really.


<A target="_blank" HREF=http://www.sunpig.com/martin/archives/2003/09/20/bt_midband_just_like_ordinary_dialup_only_without_the_good_bits_part_3/>part 3</A>


<hr width=100% size=1>Me transmitte sursum, caledoni

 

[MapisM]

Re: How to rant! Absolute classic!

Amazing piece of rant.
Any idea of where I can get a BT application form?
I'd appreciate the services provided at noon, much better than the usual coffee breaks.

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