MP3's
Created | Updated Jan 28, 2002
First off I would like to say that MP3's hold a great attraction
for me being a music lover but I don't know a great deal about them except for what I have
discovered through their use but as I learn more I shall add the information here.
Oh and PLEAAASE excuse the bad spelling....;-)
Ok well an MP3 or MPeg layer 3 is a music or sound format
much smaller than a wav file it take's up around one third of
the space. Because of this it is much easier to Move,Download,
Edit,Cut to a disk,"Rip" and Store.
Being such a virsatile format has it's drawbacks one of which being the "Rippability" of it from
"Legal" cd's to your hard drive thus leading to much debate as to wether to condone it's use by the public.
Still many game,software,
and music companies are being drawn to this format by the aforementioned advantage's.
A very notable point is the clarity of the media,almost CD quality
depending on the care taken while creating the file and the quality of
the "hardware" the file is played back on.
In fact some Hardware profiles will out do the most expencive stereo
system,as I found out the hard way :-(
Of course all this is useless with out the software to drive it
and all one need's to do is go for a quick "surf" to MP3.com
winamp.com or somewhere similar to find it...in fact a lot of "gameing" mag's have it included on their demo disk's .
It would be almost impossible for me to list all the different software type's out there for doing this but the are several of note
and are so promanint that to mention them would only sound like an advertising plug for them....even the window's defalt music player can be set up to play MP3 music. If you where to go to a site and decide to download a song in wav format on a 56k modem it might take up to 2 hour's, where as an MP3 would only take 5 or 6 minute's
depending on the size of the song of course ,the average being around 4 -5 meg's for an MP3.
The range of music that one can find online is quite boggling to say the least. No matter what type of musice you are into it will be out there for the taking. I have found everything from rap to classical
and some styles that I never knew where around. ;-)
The biggest problem I have encountered would have to be the "Addiction" of downloading all the song's as it can get to be somewhat time consuming (even worse if you have a flatrate plan).
Space can also be a problem...I realise that I have been saying how awsome this format is because of it small size...due to the fact that if you are music mad (like me) then some people might have trouble fitting 2 - 300 song's on their harddrive's ...but then again maybe not as they can be cut to a disk and played back through your CD Rom drive.
