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It was recently announced that the most common word used in search engines was no longer 'sex' but 'mp3'. The phenomenal growth in usage of this digital music format has been unprecedented. Having created your own MP3s or downloaded some from the Net, what can you do with them?
The obvious answer is to play them! There are lots of MP3 players out there. The obvious one is Microsoft's Media Player but a lot of people find this messes up their system somewhat so I'd recommend one of the myriads of third party tools such as MusicMatch Jukebox. This superb program can be downloaded from www.musicmatch.com. There is a free version which does most things but paying for the upgrade gives you quicker encoding, CD burning and much more. MusicMatch Jukebox is an all in one digital music solution that provides a lot of functionality in one box. It can turn your own CDs in to MP3s, get the CDs track listings from the Internet and automatically title the tracks for you as well as creating CDs from your MP3s.
Another good program is WinAmp. One of the first and best players, you can download the full 7Mb version from www.winamp.com. Again, it is free.
Party on Dude
A useful trick if you want to throw a party is to set up a playlist in your MP3 player of all the tracks you want to listen to. You could pre-prepare many hours of music to save having to worry about shuffling CDs around in the middle of the serious drinking/discussion. Once done, you should connect the line out from your PCs sound card to your HiFi's line in and then have your PC play the music all night. If the idea of your PC being exposed to the party excesses is a worry then you can record the music on to a HiFi capable video recorder and play the music from there. If your VCR has HiFi recording it will say so on the front somewhere. An E240 tape will hold four hours of music or eight hours in long play mode. The overall sound quality won't be totally stunning but unless someone is indulging in a critical listening session you'll get away with it and probably impress one or two with your technical savvy!
On the Move
What about if you want to listen to your tracks on the move? No problems. There are many different options. To record them to a cassette tape for your walkman or car then connect the sound card's line out to your cassette deck's line-in. Consult the relevant manuals for guidance here. Once wired up you can play MP3s on the PC and record them to the cassette deck. You could do the same thing with a Minidisk recorder. If your sound card has digital output (such as the SoundBlaster Live range) then use that instead to record to Minidisk. One warning here though, MP3 is a 'lossy' compression system which saves space by removing bits of audio information it doesn't think you'll notice. Minidisk is also lossy and works in a slightly different way. The combination of the two can create weird sound glitches on certain tracks so if you notice things sounding odd then that's possibly the problem. Most of the time you should be OK though.
CD Thoughts
If you have a CD-Burner then you can create your own custom CDs. I recently looked at Adaptec Easy CD Creator 4 that makes this very easy.
If you don't have software that lets you record MP3s directly to a CD-R that will work in normal CD players, then you have a little more work and hopefully a lot of spare disk space! To create a CD that will work on any CD player, you need to have the tracks in WAV format at 44.1Khz and 16bit. This is actually pretty straightforward to do. As an example, if you have WinAmp, you can set it to create WAV files instead of audibly playing MP3s. To do this, go to the Options menu and choose preferences then set the output to Disk Writer.
Use the configure button to set where the files will be written. Any MP3s you play will now be turned in to WAV files. When you have finished, set the output back as shown above.
Each WAV file will be around 60Mb in size or more so make sure you have plenty of spare disk space. Once you have enough tracks to fill a CD (around 650Mb worth) then use your usual CD burning software to create a music CD from the WAV files. Once you have created the CD you can delete the WAV files from your hard drive to save space.
