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Transferring Audio Files To Computer
There are two main methods of getting music files onto your computer. The first is to use your existing CDs and move the tracks to a folder on your computer.
Since music files take up a fair bit of space, about 1 MB per minute playtime, I generally use a dedicated external hard drive for my audio files. A hard drive will set you back about £70 ($120). You can get a 320 Gig Maxtor external hard drive here: Maplin Electronics if you want one. It has a £10 discount so is only £59.99. This is what I use and it is fine. You just connect it to a USB port and you are off. It’s great for storage, but if you have a preference then use your own. You can use your computer internal hard drive but you may find space top a problem if you want a decent music collection. Having an external hard drive is like having your own juke box. You can have various folders for artists and music types, genres etc. However, I am getting off the point.
Separate hard drive or not, you will need the ripping software to copy your CD collection to the computer. I use DBpowerAMP Music Converter. It not only rips audio CDs but will convert to whatever file format you want. I generally use MP3 and WAV formats. MP3 to copy to my MP3 portable player and WAV for good quality playback on the computer and for editing the waveforms. Get it here free: http://www.dbpoweramp.com/dmc.htm
You will need a CD drive that can extract CD Audio, but you computer should have that installed. Then off you go. Follow the instructions on the software and copy your CDs to your hard drive.
The next method, to get new music files, can be done in one of two ways (or both!). The first is to buy the tracks online. There are lots of online music stores you can tracks from: just pay for the ones you want. You don’t have to purchase a whole album.
The main problem here is that a lot are protected, and while you can play them fine on your computer, you can’t make a copy or transfer them to a portable player. Nor can you change the file format. And you can’t play them on another computer. Another major problem is that as file formats develop and improve, eventually your tracks will be useless because the format it is in may well be obsolete, and you can’t convert it.
Typical prices are, for examples, a Pussycat Dolls PCD album for $1.42 and the single Beep for 22c (84p and 13p respectively). A lot cheaper than a hard CD. These prices were taken from the www.allofmp3.com site, which happens to be one of the very few which does not protect its music files, so you can copy them to your portable player. There are alternative file types and rates to choose from and prices depend on quality.
At these prices you will soon save enough to pay for your 160 Gigabyte hard drive to hold them all. This will hold 2,730 hours of playtime!
Another way is to pay a lifetime registration for a P2P site and download all you want free. You can also download movies, games and software on the same registration. Although P2P can be obtained free, I found it better to have the paid versions which are much faster with more features.
Examples are here:Downloads
The only problem with P2P is that you should not download copyright protected files. I know that millions and millions of people do, but it is illegal and there is a chance you may be caught, especially if you download thousands of tracks to resell as pirate CDs.
How CDs Work
Unlike the old vinyl records, CDs cannot get scratched during play or wear out because no needle touches the surface. Also, unlike tapes, they cannot become demagnetized because there is no magnetic media. Under the covering lacquer, the playing surface consists of a number of pits and flats which a high-powered laser reads as ones and zeros respectively.
As the laser beam scans the surface, it penetrates the lacquer and reflected back off the playing surface. The pits and flats reflect differently and are collected by a photodiode which converts the information into electrical signals. These signals are in binary code, i.e. a series of zeros and ones, which indicate the height of an electrical waveform.
011|101|110|001|101|001|011
3 5 6 1 5 1 3 = height at each part of the wave, sampled at 44,100 times a second so that it represents the waveform about as accurately as you can get.
The software reconstitutes this into an audible signal.
During recording, a microphone converts the sounds into electrical current and the voltages of the signals encoded into binary digits which are fed to the laser as electrical pulses. The CD is coated with a light sensitive resin. The pulses switch the laser on and off, producing light flashes which react the chemical coating. When the light hits the resin it renders it chemically inert and the pits can be cut with a chemical which dissolves the unreacted resin coating.
This disc is then used as a master. From this several sub-masters are made from the master mould. The CDs are ‘pressed’ in much the same way as the old vinyl records but are much more accurate and faithful to the original sound than any other reproducible media. The recording is sampled about 44,100 times a second and the binary coding system can give a possible 65,535 sound levels for each of the samples.
However, in the final analysis, nothing has yet replaced the microphone as the initial stage in the recording. Marconi lives on!
New Products
The Toshiba Gigabeat is not new, but what is new is Starz Entertainments announcement re its Vongo movie download service to the Toshiba portable. For a monthly fee of $9.99 you will have unlimited access to a rotating selection of around 1600 TV and movie titles. Subscribers will be able to download to 3 designated devices per account, including the Toshiba Gigabeat portable, the only portable on which it will work. Get in at the start and get your Toshiba Gigabeat now. They are available at discount prices from Amazon: click below to have a look at Amazon's selection:
It looks great and no other portable device will be able to download the Vongo products. It will be the only portable with downloadable movies on the market.
If you prefer the 60 GB model, try this:
Although this is claimed to be the only software on the market to allow direct downloads of movies to portable players, there are actually others on the P2P network. You can have a look at that here:
That's all for now. It's slightly shorter than normal, but not a lot is happening at the moment. Apart from Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple, wanting to price movie downloads to iPods at a flat $9.99. Movie studios are in disagreement, wanting pricing to be flexible according to the movie. Who will win? Watch this space!
Jobs got his way with the music industry, but Hollywood is well known for being more hard nosed and famed for stamping on incoming upstarts.