WVSU Yellow Jacket — MP3 a veritable digital utopia part 2
By Sean Rose
OK, now that you have downloaded every Backstreet Boys MP3 you can find and digested all the local West Virginia music scene, you want to digitize all of those old Elvis Costello albums and upload them to your website so everyone can see you are the music master. Sounds cool to me.
Fire up the old reliable Windows and head on over to http://www.surf.to/cdex and pick up the latest copy of CDEX - short for CD Extractor. This gem of a program allows you to rip digital audio to your hard drive and save it as a WAV file or you can convert it straight to MP3 format. Plus, it’s 100% free. CDEX allows you to convert your MP3’s with your choice of several MP3 codecs- Blade, LAME, or if you have media player installed with the Microsoft MP3 codec. Bit rates are adjustable on all the codecs so you can balance sound quality with file size. I prefer using Blade, and after some head to head testing I decided it made the best sounding MP3. The only drawback to using Blade was it took somewhat longer to encode than the others, but if you want true CD quality sound, this is the one to use.
CDEX also has CDDB (http://cddb.com) support built in. CDDB stands for Compact Disc Database and it stores track and artist information about thousands of CDs. This means if you are online, you can automatically download the name of the audio CD in your drive complete with all the names of the songs and have CDEX automatically generate the ID Tag for the MP3 as it encodes it. It even generates the name of the song as the Windows filename.
Now that we have made all these great MP3’s we need a place to put them. Cruise your browser to your favorite search engine and type in "free webhosting." You should get a long list of free webspace providers. You can then pick one and sign up, it doesn’t cost anything, and there is no obligation on your part, just be sure to pick a host that allows you to store files. Some hosts only allow webpages and small picture files. Many of these services allow you to pick your own domain name as well such as superfly.coolme.mp3haven. All of the web hosts have complete instructions that can easily walk you through setting up your page and uploading your new MP3 files. If you have a local Internet Service Provider such as Intelos or Citynet you have free webspace available with them. Check your ISP’s homepage for more information.
As for last week’s promise, here is the link to download a mystery track off the Smashing Pumpkins new album "Machina: Machines of God" - http://www.8op.com/cycline3/sp.mp3. Get it today and check it out, it’s real old school alterna rock and roll. Send any rants and raves, Linux questions or death threats to srose@cycline3.com. All submissions are subject to public scrutiny so write well.
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