An Introduction To MP3...

MP3 stands for MPEG Layer 3. It is a music compression format that shrinks the size of music while still maintaining a high level of quality. There is tons of MP3 music available on the internet, although the majority of it being illegal pirated music, you can find good, legal music at sites like MP3.com. After you have downloaded the music, you will need a MP3 player, if you're on Mac, the best one in my opnion is SoundJam MP by Casady & Greene. It is $49USD but is definately worth it, it includes a CD to MP3 encoder, a MP3 to AIFF encoder, a CD to AIFF encoder, a graphic equalizer, a playlist and CDDB. The only minus is most of it's skins are horrible. The 2 other main players are MacAST (Formerly MacAMP) and Audion. MacAST (MacAMP) has been around the longest, and was possibly the first Mac MP3 player, but it has fallen apart, SoundJam tears it up feature-wise and Audion kills it in skins. Audion has the best-looking skins out of the bunch, but it lacks in playback quality.

Heres how I rated them (Click on their names to Download them, out of 5 *s)

SoundJam MP (Demo): **** MacAST:** Audion: ***

Now What?

Okay, So you got the player, now what do you play? The best site that I know of for legal MP3s is MP3.com. They have thousands of bands that you never heard of, and a lot that you probably have heard of, too. That is my favortie part about MP3s, you discover a varitey of talented artists that yiu never knew existed.

But I Want That New Album By <insert artist here>!@!@

Sorry, but I do not support illegal bootlegs. If you found a song by a well-known artist that is on a released album, chances are it was illegally copied off of a CD and posted on the internet. Unfortunately, they make up for most of the MP3s on the internet and are responsible for the booming popularity of the format (not to mention the recording industrie's hatred of it). If you like to steal from hard-working people, go ahead and do so, but this is against my ethics. You may not think that it harms the artist financially, but you'd be suprised. It also hurts the record companies, which I don't have as much sympathy for. Plus, if you pirate it, you are decreasing the chances of another album from this artist (or at least delaying it). I am not trying to tell you what to do, just giving you the facts. But, by me taking the time to write this, I hope I have at least changed the mind of one MP3 bootlegger.