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Member of the MP3 Banner Exchange |
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Member of the MP3 Banner Exchange |
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MP3 is short for MPEG Audio Layer 3, a compression method that allows for CD quality sound and a very small file size. When people say "MP3s", they are referring to sound files compressed in the MP3 format - usually music. MP3 generally gets a bad rap because it is most often associated with people who have abused this technology by recording CD tracks and posting them on web sites or trading them on FTPs. Eventually, you get people who stop paying for CDs that they would have otherwise bought, meaning that the music industry loses money and the rest of us who buy the CDs have to pay more money for them to make up for the losses from piracy. MP3 is important because it puts RealAudio to shame - allowing for streaming CD quality sound, and because it shrinks file sizes down at a 12:1 compression ratio from WAV files. MP3s have done for sound what JPEGs have done for images.
How to Make
MP3s
Backing Up (Ripping)
CDs | Mistakes to Avoid | Speakers
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| United States copyright laws state that it
is perfectly legal for someone who has purchased media to make copies for
their own personal use. In other words, if you own a CD, but you
only have a tape player in your car, it is completely legal for you to
copy that CD onto tape and play it in your car. It's only illegal
for you to make copies and sell them to other people, because then the
people who made the CD lose money. This is also true for MP3s.
Many people want to hear their CDs while working at the computer, but have
their CD drive busy with the program they're using to work. To do
both, they need to make MP3 copies of the tracks on their CDs, but to make
MP3s that are CD-quality can be difficult. Below is a 6-step
guide to how to copy one track.
1. You're going to need a few programs and a large amount of free disk space to do this. You'll need an MP3 player to hear your MP3s once you've created them, you'll need a CD ripper program to digitally make a copy of the track as a WAV file on your hard drive, you'll need an MP3 encoder to convert it from a WAV to an MP3, and atleast 100MB of free disk space to temporarily store the sound data before it's compressed. 2. If running Win95, download and install this software:
If running Win31/DOS, download and install this software:
3. Insert the CD into your CD drive (duh). With AudioGrabber, you'll need to select the track you wish to rip. The shareware version randomly makes certain tracks unavailable, so if the track you want isn't available, quit out and start the program again. Hopefully, the track you want is now available. If you wish to only rip part of a track, right click the track and edit the properties. As for the general settings, I suggest accessing the CD through MSCDEX instead of ASPI, and disable "Continue even if syncronization fails". The major problem with rippers is finding out whether or not your CD drive can read digital audio. All CD-R drives do. Most SCSI CD drives do. Many IDE CD drives do. Most Mitsumi CD drives don't. This is because they were specially designed to be a pain in the ass in an attempt to curtail illegal piracy of CDs. Don't buy Mitsumi drives! 4. Optional: Open the WAV file in your favorite editor. Make sure there is no clipping (poping sounds), skips, or anything else that sounds bad or different from the way the track on the CD sounds played in your CD drive. How your WAV file sounds now will be exactly how it sounds as an MP3. The only difference is that the WAV file is probably about 25MB, while the MP3 will be about 3MB. If there's a problem, you're going to have to rip the track again. 5. Run your MP3 encoding program and convert the WAV to MP3. Make
sure that you compress it in CD/high quality, 128,000 bitrate, and 44.1kHz.
Sound
Limit has an easy to follow "wizard" type interface, and produces perfect
quality MP3s, plus Sound
Limit is 4x faster than Fraunhofer's L3enc.
This can take awhile and alot of CPU resources, so don't plan on multitasking
while compression is taking place.
6. Run your MP3 player and listen to your creation! Again, I must
stress that sharing MP3s from CDs you own with people who do not own them
is illegal and officially discouraged. I am not responsible for your
misuse of this information. Please read the disclaimer.
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| Let's face it. Portable CD players have their problems. They skip because of the slightest bump or shake. Sure there's anti-skip technology, which basically loads the music a few seconds ahead into short term memory so that what you hear is from a memory chip and not the CD, but keeping that running all the time drains the batteries even faster than the blazing speed it normally does. Plus you've got to carry around a CD case to hold all of your CDs, and on most of your CDs you only really like a couple of tracks. So if you go on a trip, you're carrying your CD player, head phones, a CD case, and a box full of batteries. Now imagine if all you needed was a player, head phones, and the batteries in the player would last the whole trip. With mp-man, that's all you need; well, that and a computer at home. Similar to 3Com's PalmPilot / IBM's Workpad, mp-man will have a docking station, which connects to your PC using the parallel port and will be used when transferring MP3 files from your computer to the player. The player has 16MB of flashable memory, upgradable to 64MB. Also, because information can also be transferred back to a PC, the mp-man doubles as a data transfer system. Because there are no moving parts, battery drain is minimal. Finally, it fits in the palm of your hand and only weighs 0.15 pounds (without batteries). The cost of this unit is $300 for the 32MB version and $500 for 64MB. | Please note: Mel's "page is already out of date...
The ISO 11172-3 specification came in, and much of the information contained
on [Mel's] page needs to be updated. Hopefully this will happen soon."
Unlike the mp-man, this player is far from being finished, however Mel
is trying to work out some problems mp-man hasn't. He wants a small,
quiet, and inexpensive player, believeing that the $300 for mp-man
(with 64MB) is "unacceptable". Appearantly, the reason mp-man costs
so much is because of its use of flash memory. According to Mel,
"Flash memory would be ideal if you wanted very long battery life, small
size, silent operation, and great ruggedness. However, flash memory has
exactly one flaw: cost. Even with Intel's new ultra low cost Strataflash
memories (not yet in production, they will cost around $6.50 per megabyte),
even a minuscule 32 megabytes of flash memory will cost more than $200.
No one wants to pay that much when a sony minidisc player does nearly the
same thing for 1/2 the cost and has $15 rerecordable disks. The device
supposedly is expandable up to 64 megabytes, but I can only imagine how
much that would cost!" As an alternative to CDs and flash memory,
Mel has decided to use PCMCIA hard disks. Mel figures, "Cost is a
factor, considering that a 1.4 gig 2.5" laptop drive still costs in the
$150-200 range, but this is justifiable when compared to
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| Basically, the mp3mobile invloves building a small PC inside your car running Linux and patched into your car's audio system. I'll have more info in the next update. FTL 'til then. Also, I'm considering building my own version of this... |
MPEG Audio Layer 3 Information
Current Best List | Interesting
Player Decoder Info | Links
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| Of all the freely available decoders - mpg123,
XAudio,
maplay,
amp
- mpg123 has the lowest CPU usage and
best audio quality. (amp
warbles). This is the reason why MP3 players such as K-Jofol use
mpg123.
While other decoders, such as AudioEnlightenment are better, it's interesting to note how they were written. Although Sexo(sonic/rasta) has done much to improve it, AudioEnlightnment is actually based on mpg123. Digideck's decoder is actually just mpg123 stripped of all but MPEG Layer 3 decoding. WinAMP's Nitrane is based on the Fraunhofer specification, but all the code in there was written by Justin (a.k.a. Burn), the creator of WinAMP. (Although Justin did borrow some imdct optimizations from maplay, but rewrote them.) |
VQF is a custom format of audio compression developed by Yamaha.
VQFs are generally 30-50% smaller than MP3s of the same quality.
However, while an MP3 may take about 10-20% CPU usage, a VQF will take
about 30%. 
Also,
VQFs are of higher quality at the same bitrate than MP3s. An 80kbps
VQF is of the same quality as a 128kbps MP3, and a 96kbps VQF is of the
same quality as a 256kbps MP3. However, VQFs also take longer to encode
than MP3s; and because VQF is Yamaha's custom format and there is really
no documentation available on VQF encoding, only Yamaha-based encoders
are available. Also, because VQF is relatively new compared to MP3,
few VQF files are available for download. The best VQF player is
K-Jofol
v0.3p1.
Originally, Advanced Audio Compression (AAC) was supposed to be the
next logical step forward in digital audio compression - something along
the lines of "twice the quality at half the disk space" compared to MP3s.
However, Fraunhofer's software
would force the use of restrictions such as locks and keys; and if this
were the only software available, these restrictions would kill AAC's acceptence
within the audio compression community. However, Homeboy Software
is developing their own AAC software that makes restrictions such as locks
and keys optional. v0.5a of Homeboy's Encoder
(Win9x/NT) and v1.0 of Homeboy's Decoder (Win9x/NT)
are available for preview.
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but don't put any unshielded speakers (like the ones from your portable
stereo) near your monitor, computer, or magnetic media. An unshilded
speaker near your monitor is like putting a magnet near your TV.
An unshileded speaker near your computer could cause hard drive corruption
/ data loss. An unshilded speaker near your magnetic media will likewise
cause data loss. By close, I mean 3 to 6 inches.
