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Digital music comes of age
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November 29, 2001: 3:33 p.m. ET
A practical guide to making the most of the MP3 revolution
By Borzou Daragahi
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NEW YORK (Money) - Even though I am a devoted music lover and have long been something of a technophile, I managed to avoid the MP3 digital music revolution for years. When Napster, the music-sharing program that jump-started the MP3 craze, was the hottest thing on the Net in 1999 and 2000, I still demurred. It all seemed like a morass of obscure acronyms, expensive hardware and inscrutable slang. Besides, I loved my worn vinyl records and neatly stacked compact disks. How could MP3s compete?
Then a friend bought me a portable MP3 player around the time I got a high-speed Internet line at home. Slowly, I ventured into the music-sharing communities on the Web and discovered the wonders of online radio. I stumbled upon tiny, relatively inexpensive gadgets that can store hours of music. I learned how to copy songs from my CD collection and record them onto blank disks. A year ago, I doubted that MP3s would ever find a place in my life. Now I consider the flexible, easy-to-use, portable little files essential parts of my music library.
Technologically, MP3s are just sound files compressed to a manageable size. PCs have long been able to play music; it was storing music that was the problem. Before MP3, a minute of music consumed 10MB of disk space. A full-length CD could hog up to half a gigabyte. MP3s use less than 1MB a minute without garbling sound quality. That means you can store lots of music on a hard drive, send and receive songs over the Net and transfer music to portable devices in a jiffy.
Once the Net's MP3 nexus, Napster is now a shadow of its former self. Since the program acted as a hub for downloading entire libraries of songs for free, a federal court declared it in violation of copyright laws, effectively shutting it down. But MP3 is here to stay and getting more popular every day. Analysts estimate that 15 million people were downloading music this summer, up from 13 million during Napster's 2000 peak. Sales of portable MP3 players totaled 2.45 million in 2000, three times 1999 sales, and Phil Leigh, an analyst at brokerage firm Raymond James, expects 8 million players to ship by the end of this year.
After months of testing equipment, programs and websites, I came up with a plan for those interested in making the digital conversion. Whether you love to make mixes or listen to music while you jog, drive or sit at your computer, whether you graze for tunes on the radio or follow a particular genre, going digital can improve the way you listen to music and turn you on to new listening experiences.
Turn your PC into a music machine
The benefits. Any computer with a CD-ROM drive can play music. But I turned my computer into a jukebox with over 1,000 tracks on 10GB of storage space.
What you'll need. All newer computers come with basic software that plays audio CDs as well as programs like RealPlayer that tune into online radio stations and play MP3 files. I suggest that you forget all those; instead, go to www.musicmatch.com and download an excellent free program called Musicmatch Jukebox (which comes in both Windows and Mac versions). Musicmatch Jukebox does everything the preloaded programs do, only better, plus a few things they can't. Like RealPlayer, Musicmatch plays MP3s, but it also lets you play, copy, or "rip," songs from your CDs to your hard drive, and record, or "burn," them onto blank ones.
Make sure you have a computer with enough RAM (at least 128MB), so that it can play music and perform other tasks without crashing. To store music on your computer, as opposed to just playing CDs from your collection, you'll need a large hard drive. One gigabyte can hold just over 16 hours of standard MP3 files. New mid-price computers typically come with 40GB hard drives these days; unless you're serious about storing a lot of files, that should be plenty.
Most PCs' built-in speakers, especially those of laptops, sound tinny. If the speakers that came with your computer aren't cutting it, plug in Monsoon's $99 MH-502, or even Cambridge SoundWorks' $50 PCWorks speakers, and you'll find that you've got a decent sound system.
Mix and record your own custom song list
The benefits. CD burners let you create your own best-of mixes, allowing you to record music on blank 60-cent CD-Rs. (Rewritable CD-RWs cost $3.) You can record about an hour of music on each in standard CD format or about 10 times as much in compressed MP3s.
What you'll need: Most desktop computers made in the last year come with drives that are not only "readable" but "writable" -- meaning that they can record songs stored on your hard drive back onto a blank compact disk. If you have an older machine, you can buy an external CD burner, which connects to your computer via USB or FireWire connections and costs between $150 and $400. Iomega's sleek $200 Predator drive is compatible with both PCs and Macs and worked flawlessly during my tests. Both built-in and stand-alone burners come with the necessary software, but Musicmatch Jukebox is still the best program around.
The drawbacks. Ripping and burning can be a slow process. Duplicating one 60-minute Sergio Mendes CD took me 30 minutes. Also, most older conventional CD players can play disks that have been burned in the standard CD audio format, but they can't read CDs loaded with compressed MP3 files. That's changing, however, and manufacturers have begun making MP3-ready portable and stereo component CD players.
Download MP3s and listen to streaming music online
The benefits. Growing up listening to Chicago's eclectic, album-oriented WXRT, I fell in love with radio. But I find today's top-40-dominated airwaves stultifying. Thanks to MP3 streaming audio, however, my listening options have expanded exponentially. There are thousands of radio stations broadcasting over the Internet, letting you listen to music, news programs and features from webcasters worldwide. Nullsoft's Shoutcast.com links to more than 2,000 Internet radio stations. Another good streaming-audio hub is Live365.com. You can also search for your favorite radio stations' websites directly at Yahoo or Google.
Alternatively, you can explore one of the many post-Napster file-sharing communities for songs to download. (Many remain untouched by the court decision that clamped down on Napster because they use a different technology.) Once you download your tunes, you can listen to them on your computer, transfer them onto an MP3 player or copy them onto a blank CD. Keep a few things in mind, however: Although ripping, rearranging and burning songs from CDs that you own for your own enjoyment leaves you on safe legal ground, downloading copyrighted music without permission from or payment to the copyright holder is almost always illegal (see the box below). But some artists do release free promotional MP3s of their songs, and you can also sample streaming-audio versions of songs at websites like Amazon.com and CDNow.com.
What you'll need. To listen to Internet radio, all you need is the right software. RealPlayer or Windows Media Player software installed on your computer will do. A fast Net connection helps.
To download songs, you need to install one of the many file-sharing tools, like Morpheus, Limewire and Kazaa, available at download.cnet.com. I prefer Kazaa for its easy-to-use interface.
The drawbacks. Downloading music using file-swapping programs can be extremely slow, even if you have a fast broadband connection to the Web. Sometimes a song will download in three minutes. Other times it might take 20 hours. Occasionally, the utilities will download only fragments of the songs. Streaming audio is subject to the whims of Internet congestion; get ready for frequent pauses and interruptions.
Take your MP3s on the run
The benefits. As an avid runner, I consider my cassette-tape-size Diamond Rio 500 MP3 player a godsend. Unlike a cassette player, its sound doesn't degrade as the battery weakens, and unlike a CD player, it never skips. I pick and choose my daily workout playlist from among the 1,000 selections on my hard drive and transfer up to two hours of music to my Rio through a USB cable with a single click.
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SonicBlue Rio 800 | |
What you'll need. The magic word is storage; the more built into the player, the better. The SONICblue Rio 800 ($250), an updated version of my player, has 128MB of built-in memory, letting you store more than two hours of music at the standard sound-quality setting. MP3 jukeboxes, which are slightly larger than portable CD players, let you store enormous amounts of on-the-go music. Creative's $400 Nomad Jukebox weighs less than two pounds and stores up to 20GB of music. That means you can either use it as an extra hard drive or carry around 320 hours of music wherever you go. A $200 docking station with two speakers lets you turn the Nomad into a portable boom box.
The drawbacks. Expansion cards to add memory to small MP3 players cost anywhere from $30 to $250, depending on how much music they can store. Since there is no industrywide standard among the plethora of competing brands and formats, locating the right ones for your player can sometimes be a hassle. Better to buy a couple of extra cards when you purchase your player. 
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