Macintosh MP3 Beginner's Guide
By John Fu, ZDNet Music
Get all the information you ever wanted about this new technology that could revolutionize audio on the Internet.
Tired of swapping CDs in and out of your stereo to play your favorite songs? While buying a 50-disc changer might mitigate this annoyance somewhat, it's still a pain to figure out what song is on which track on which disc in the changer. The solution to this problem is staring you right in the face. With your Mac, your CD collection, and a handy technology called MP3, the days of CD-shuffling will soon be behind you.
Using the MPEG Layer III (thus MP3) encoding algorithm, you can compress a 34MB raw sound file to a 3MB MP3 file, which makes storing and playing back huge song collections on your Mac entirely possible.
Figure A: MP3 encoding seriously slims down bloated audio files.
This amazing file squeeze does come at a cost: you need a reasonably fast Power Mac to play MP3s and while MP3 files are promoted as CD-quality, some quality is lost in the compression process. The level of quality achieved depends in large part on the bit-rate at which the audio data is encoded - the higher the compression, the lower the bit-rate and sound quality. 128kbps is a fairly common bit-rate, though larger 168 kbps files are also popular. Less-popular MP2 files use the less-complex MPEG Layer II encoding scheme but achieve similar compression and quality to MP3 at a 128 kbps bitrate.
Besides the technical mumbo-jumbo, there are some legal issues involved. Making MP3s of songs you own on CD or of audio files you created yourself is perfectly legitimate; however, trading MP3s of copyrighted music is akin to selling bootleg Tupac tapes on the street corner. (Well, maybe not that bad.) While RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) agents probably won't break down your door the second you download or send an MP3 file, record labels have been known to shut down popular MP3 sites on the Internet. With those caveats in mind, here's a step-by-step look at the MP3 process.
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Step One: The Great Rip-Off |
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