MP3 (MPEG Layer 3) is a method of compressing audio samples with minimal loss of quality, in fact compression of upto 12:1 is possible with no loss of quality. What this means to you or me is that a 3 minute song which would take up 30-40 Mb in normal .WAV format can now be squashed down to 3-4Mb in Full 44khz Stereo. It will take about 15-20 minutes to download a file of this size. (based on 28k Modem and fast servers).
To listen to mp3s you will need an mp3 player (now I get it). Winplay3 is the most popular.
Before you create your own .MP3 files here are some guidelines..
If you are going to let your MP3 files be availible to the general public, it should never have been recorded off the radio or
tape etc., Only Release CD-Rip's! (See Below). Always Copy Directly off the CD, This means using a utility to read the CD
and dump the audio data directly onto your HD. Never Record off the CD using utilities like Sound Recorder, Sound O'LE or
CoolEdit, Because all you are doing is converting from Digital to Analogue and back to Digital again, so you lose quality.
After ripping the CD Track there may be a pop or perhaps some silence at the begining of the sample, if there is use a decent
sample editor, like CoolEdit 96 to cut these out. When you encode from WAV to MP3 Always use a base rate of 128000,
this is the optimal rate, you get good (about 10:1) compression and no quality loss. (Don't worry if you dont know what I
mean by Base Rate, you'll see what I mean when you download and use the software..) There is some debate about using the
"-hq" (High Quality) option on the encoder, it will take about 4 times longer to encode if you do and some people say it
actually ruins the sample. You'll have to judge for yourself. Encoding a 4 Minute CD Track will take about half an hour on a
P100 so you might want to set it going while you watch TV or something....
1.Rip the audio data from CD to your HD with the program CDDA or another CD Ripper.Quick Usage: CDDA.EXE /T 4 /F temp.wav /O /M Would read track 4 off your CD-Drive and save it as temp.wav
2.Cut any silences or pops from the ends of the sample with the best Windows sample editor: CoolEdit 96
3.Now encode the finished .WAV file into .MP3 with the MPEG Software. Quick Usage: L3ENC.EXE coolsong.wav coolsong.mp3 -br 128000 Would Encode coolsong.wav into a MP3 file called coolsong.mp3. (Will take about 25 minutes on a P100)
4.Listen to .MP3's in the background with Winplay3 2.0 or MuseArc Beta.