WVSU Yellow Jacket — MP3 – A veritable digital utopia
By Sean Rose
For those of you not already mining the information superhighway for MP3’s, a MP3 is a digital music file for your computer. It is a compressed form of the information stored on a standard music CD. In this compressed form, a song can be downloaded off the Internet in about 10 minutes through a standard modem and sounds almost exactly like it does when played off the original CD. MP3’s tremendous sound quality and small size have made it as popular as sex. Check the search engines top searched for items, and it bobs back and forth from hotties to MP3 freebies.
In order to play an MP3 on your computer you need a Pentium-Class processor, a 16-bit soundcard and a set of speakers – all standard fare on most machines. You then need to get yourself a software player, a program that uncompresses the MP3 and plays the music back for you. The two most popular players are Winamp (www.winamp.com) and Sonique (www.sonique.com) and are available for free download. Sonique has much cooler skins (add-ons that change the way the player looks) but Winamp is much easier on the processor and makes it easier and faster to do other things like surf the net while you are listening to your MP3’s.
Now that you have your supaphat digital player you need to get some music. Typing MP3 in a search engine box will get you “about 2,042,905 pages found” most of which are shutdown or totally devoid of any music and just want you to click here and there to make someone somewhere make money. Just don’t do it. First step music miners, point your browser over to www.puremp3.org. They list all types of music from Christian, Alternative, Electronic, Hip-Hop and more and all the sites have to be pop-up free and free of any pornographic links. Puremp3’s slogan is “pure mp3 – if you want porn, go to a porn site.” Right on. Click on the music type you want and start checking out the sites listed.
If you are a local music fan, check out www.8op.com/cycline3/bevy.html for West Virginia’s own Karma to Burn and Porn Carburrettor Queen. Then meander over to Digital Utopia at http://129.71.200.146/ and click the FTP server link and check out the MP3 folder. You’ll find electronica from AnalogX and Ahbolysk.
Last and certainly not least, sail on to www.mp3.com and help ruin the RIAA’s day by using MP3.com’s Beam-It technology to convert all your favorite CD’s into streaming MP3’s so you can listen to them at work, school, or on the run with a portable player. On occasion, you can sign up for free MP3 CD’s mailed straight to you at no cost. I’ve had two of these silver gems dropped in my PO Box and there has been some really good music on them. Check out Fern, (http://artists.mp3s.com/artists/33/fern.html) a cool alterna-pop guitar band that has some really good songs you can get for free.
Next week, I give you the lowdown on creating your own MP3’s from your CD’s, how and where to store them on the web and a link to download a bootleg recording of a track off the Smashing Pumpkins new album Machina : Machina of the Gods not out in stores until Feb. 29th.
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