In the course of just a few years the face of how we listen to music has changed. At no other time have we had the convenience of listening to music as we do now. This emergence is due largely in part to the development and marketing of the MP3 audio file format. You can now carry hours of music with you wherever you go in a device that is no larger then your credit card.

What is an MP3?

A MP3 is a audio file format that is compressed, reducing the size of the file without loss of sound quality. An MP3 can compress an average CD-quality song by as much as 10% or 14%. You can make your own CD of MP3 files that would be the equivalent of carrying approximately 14 to 20 music CD’s.

Example: Of compression:

 Full 700mb CD of meeting files or Music audio files: Ripped at 128bits, approximately size after converting to MP3 is 50 or 60mb. 

Technology behind the MP3

The MP3 format is created by modeling the way a human ear works. Their are sounds a human ear can’t hear or hears better than others. The human ear will hear the louder sound rather then the softer one.  With this in mind there are parts of a song that can be eliminated without degrading the quality of the song to the listener. The result is a song that is considerably reduced in size with near CD quality sound.

Ripping and converting your own MP3’s

The most popular application for the MP3 is to convert your audio CD’s to an mp3 format. Allowing you to store a greater capacity of music on your computer and to facilitate greater portability with your music collection.

We will take you step by step on how to convert your Audio CD’s to mp3 and your mp3 files back to CD audio format, so you can play them in your portable CD- player. For the sake of time and space, we will stick with one of the most popular Media players, Windows Media Player 11. You can download Microsoft Media Player from the Microsoft site.

There are other formats which you can convert your CD audio files to, such as WMA ( Microsoft) or AAC or MP4 (itunes) however they are proprietary formats and generally can only be played with players that are compatible with that format. We will stick with MP3 format because of its universal popularity and compatibility with most players.

The quality of your recordings will depend largely on the “bit rate” you record at — that is, the number of bits of encoded data that are used to represent each second of audio. When you convert your files to MP3 format you want to use 128kilbits per second on up. The higher the bit rate the larger the file. Generally 128 is sufficient to make a good sounding mp3 at a acceptable size to quality ratio. A lower bit rate then 128 will start to degrade the quality of the recording.

How to rip a Audio CD of  your music to MP3 format in Windows Media Player (v11)

1. Insert an audio CD into the CD drive

2. Click the arrow below the Rip tab, and choose MP3 under format and 128 or 192 under bit rate.

3. If you wish to select only certain songs to rip you can remove the check boxes next to the songs you don’t want to rip.

4. Click start rip

5. After the songs have been ripped, you can find and play them in your library.

Downloading your MP3 files

You can download your favorite song in MP3 format on the internet through many internet music download sites. You can also have these mp3’s converted to a audio CD to play in your car or home audio CD players. Do to the limitations of many of today’s CD players playing actual MP3 files we will touch upon here how to convert and burn your MP3’s back to CD audio compatible format that will allow you to play on any CD player.

How to convert your downloaded or stored MP3’s to an audio CD

1. Click the arrow below the Burn tab, and then click Audio CD.

2. Insert a blank CD-R or CD-RW disc into the CD burner.

3. If you have multiple CD burners and the burner you want to use is not the one selected, choose the one you want to use by clicking the Next Drive link in the List pane above the playlist.

4. To add files from your Windows Media library, you can drag them from the Details pane to the List pane to create a list of files to burn.

You can clear the list pane by clicking on the Clear List pane button.

5. To add a file that is on your computer but not in your library, you can drag the file to the List pane.

6. If you have selected more files than can fit on one CD, the Player can burn all of the files to multiple CDs. If you only want to burn one CD in this session, remove files from the list until they all fit on one CD. To do so, right-click the file you want to remove, and then click Remove from List. Note that removing files from the burn list will not delete the affected files from the library.

7. Click start burn

Note:

It’s not recommended that you try to perform any other tasks on the computer while burning a CD. Example, playing music or recording from Windows Media player may interfier with the burning process.

Listening to your the MP3’s

Portable MP3 players will allow you to take your music with you where ever you go. As a general rule if you can afford it, buy the largest capacity player that is out there, you will find that you’ll want to put more and more mp3’s on it as times goes by. You can purchase players with capacities ranging from 12mb to 80gb. If you’re like me all that you will most likely need is a 1 or 2 gb player which will carry approximately 240(1gb) to 440(2gb) songs or the equivalent of about 20(1gb) or 40(2gb) CDs.

If you have any questions regarding this topic you can post them here at the Forums

Resources:

Free alternative mp3 players and encoders – WinAmp, Audiograbber, iTunes