My MP3s: A Life Story

This serves no purpose other than me wanting to write something about music and technology. Who knows, maybe one of you will like what you see and you'll adopt it - but probably not. If it's long winded, forgive me. Feel free to go browse Fark or Slashdot or something if it gets too boring. [And by the way, those of you who have done the right thing by downloading Firefox and reclaiming your fast and pop-up and ad-free internet, congrats. I can see browser stats via the counter at the bottom. For those of you who haven't, why? Do you love pop-ups? Support open-source software. Support GOOD software.]

So how does an mp3 come to be in my digital domain? Well, it's obviously one of two ways, from either a direct rip of one of my CDs or from somewhere on the internet. Let's discuss the former first.

The ripper of choice, for the last couple years, has been Exact Audio Copy [or EAC]. EAC is a ripper designed by and designed for hardcore music enthusiasts. The bit-whores, if you will - they want the absolute best quality rips done as quickly as possible. It's open source, COMPLETELY FREE, and simple to use. My dad freaking uses it. As it's only a ripper, you need an encoder to go with it. Since we're talking mp3 here [as opposed to OGG, APE, WMA, or something else], the encoder you want is LAME [Lame Aint a MP3 Encoder - stupid recursive name, I know]. So I load EAC, pop in the CD of choice, and EAC connects to FreeDB, an online [open source, free] database of CD information: Artists, Song Titles, Album Titles, etc. EAC will then automatically name the tracks, supply the year, genre, track number, and artist for each track for the MP3's ID3 tag. What's an ID3 tag? More on that later. So I click 'Rip to MP3' and a few minutes later, steaming hot mp3 goodness is at my fingertips. They then get tagged, renamed, and sorted.

I've been asked where I get my mp3s from, now that services like KaZaA and [in the old days] Napster have gone to shit. The first place I turn to is IRC [Internet Relay Chat], which over the years, has developed into the place to get shady stuff. So what does IRC'ing entail? First, you go and download mIRC, which is the best IRC client out there. Now that you've got the software, how do you find the files? One of the easiest ways is to use an IRC indexing site like IRC Spy. Just type in what you're looking for, like say, "Bad Religion" and IRCSpy will tell you where you need to go to get it. Then you click on the pack numbers, join the servers, and grab your loot.

Another hot place to get files is Usenet, or "the newsgroups". Get a newsreader like NewsLeecher and hit a binary newsgroup search engine, like the one at alt.binaries.nl and search for what you want there. When you find what you want, click on "download NZB" and once you run that NZB file, the object of your downloading desire will get thrown in your download queue. Downside to Usenet? You usually gotta pay for server access. And software too, if you're one of those "honest" people. I don't claim to be one.

Then there's an old standard, P2P [peer-to-peer] filesharing. Since KaZaA has become [and in my opinion, always was] a total piece of spyware-ridden crap and the RIAA is hunting file-sharers on basically it exclusively, you might as well look at alternatives. I don't really use P2Ps all that much, but if you want to use them, I suggest first SoulSeek. Cost-free, ad-free, and spy-ware free. You will experience some nasty waiting times, but if you've got the patience, you can get just about anything. Other worthy things to use are LimeWire which runs on the Gnutella network, and eMule, which runs on the eDonkey network [ed2k links].

And the only other option I'll discuss is BitTorrent [BT]. To use BT, you download a .torrent file, which serves as a "guide" for your downloading. You connect to a tracker, which directs BT as to who has the file shared for download, and what parts of the file everybody has. Then you and the others, as a collective "swarm", connect amongst yourselves [all this is automatic, people] and you download and upload pieces of the file concurrently until you've gotten it all. Where do you find torrents? Well, torrent sites are all over the net now, but I recommend SuprNova as a starting point.

Okay, now we've got the mp3, what happens to it next?

I'm a messy person. My room is always in a state of disarray and chaos, my car is messy - I'm messy with just about everything with one exception...my computer files. I keep my mp3s neat and tidy with a set naming scheme:
\multimedia\mp3\[genre]\[artist]\[album (year)]\##-artist_name-track_title.mp3
Since renaming a lot of files can be a tedious task, I enlist the help of this free Batch Renamer to help me rename files all at once. Lots of good features, and it's a tiny download.

Now that we've got the files, got them properly named, it's time to make sure the ID3 tags have good information. ID3 tags are little text files appended to the ends [or beginnings] of your mp3s that contain information about the track - technical things like bitrate, size of file, name of encoder - but they also have 'metadata', things like the Artist's name, track number, album, genre, year, and any additional comments. Why is it important to keep tidy ID3 tags? Well, it's not important per se, but if you want to use your mp3s in some of the more exciting ways mentioned later, it's nice to have them nice and organized. Besides, you only have to set the ID3 info once, and if used EAC from earlier, it did it for you already. But if everybody had their ID3s right, you wouldn't download a song called "Outkast - Hey Ya!" off KaZaA only to open it up and see that it's a copy of "For Whom The Bell Tolls" by Metallica, and yes, that has happened to me.

Okay MJ, you anal bastard - you've got them sorted, named, and tagged. Are we ever going to play the goddamned mp3s?

When mp3s were in their infancy, the only player you bothered with was Winamp. I won't lie, Winamp is still the king - those people at Nullsoft take their product seriously, and by god, it's a solid mp3 player. Everybody who listens to mp3s should have Winamp installed on their computer. End of arguement. And if you use any of the following to play your music, please, please stop and find a better player [Winamp or iTunes]:
1. Windows Media Player
2. MusicMatch JukeBox
3. RealOne Jukebox
Those three programs are total, useless shit. If you want a jukebox application, and trust me after trying it you'll love it, you want to mosey over to Apple and pick up their wonderful iTunes program. I'm a PC user [WinXP] and their Windows version works flawlessly. So go get it, it really makes listening to your mp3s a lot of fun. A great interface, no more fumbling through Windows Explorer windows, and it's integrated into the iTunes Music Store, the world's largest online music download store. The smart playlists are incredible. And if you've got an iPod, it's a no-brainer. How pretty can it be?:


My iTunes in action [whoo Elephant 6] 

Okay MJ, so you can play mp3s on your computer, BFD. The real fun is when you put them to use in other places.

For Christmas in 2001, I got an AIWA CDC-MP3 in-dash mp3-cd player. I can put a CD full of .mp3 files, and my car will play 'em, and show me stuff like Artist Name, Track Name, album, and song length on the player's face. It was super-hot technology at the time, but since has been eclipsed by much better players. It's still reliable, and I still use it on the go. Though admittedly, I mainly use the 'Auxilliary Input' jack on the front nowadays.

In late 2003, I realized it was time to get off my ass and purchase a portable mp3 player. As I had about 90gb of music at the time, I figured nothing less than one of those huge jukebox players would cut it. So I ended up with a Creative Nomad Zen Xtra 40gb music player. The choice was simple economics: 40gb Nomad for $200 [after rebates] or a 40gb iPod for $550 [after buying a firewire card]. The iPod is sexy and great, but not 2x the price great. 40gb is nice, but 120gb would be nicer [though I'd settle for 80gb].

So now we've got the car and on-the-go covered, that leaves only one major area left: the rooms of the house away from the computer. Solution? Xbox Media Center, an application for modded Microsoft Xboxes that allows you to play video, audio, and picture files. And just about every damned format that you can imagine. So I share my mp3s and movies over the network, and then I can pump the sounds through my Xbox into my good speakers near the TV. Home entertainment bliss.

So as a whole, I'm a big, big fan of the digital music revolution. I still buy CDs, but what's the first thing I do with it? Fire up EAC, rip and encode it, then put the disc in its case and back on the shelf. I buy CDs to support good artists, but also as higher-fidelity sources for my mp3s. That, and most CD players don't have mp3 capability [yet], so taking a CD to a friend's place is just easier.

MP3 might not be the best format out there [Apple AAC, Ogg Vorbis, and a few others are noteably better] but its widespread acceptance and integration makes it the clear winner. So keep the technology alive, use it, fight DRM [Digital Rights Management - which dictates to you, the user, how you're allowed to use YOUR OWN FILES], and don't buy copy-protected CDs. Go read Downhill Battle for some more great digital music advocacy info.

Holy shit that was long-winded. If you made it to the end, congrats, and I apologize. Make me buy you a beer sometime or something.