Karl said:
Thanks, great explanation!
Now, if I buy a portable CD/MP3 player, do I then go and download MP3 files
onto the harddrive and from there burn them to a CD?
I looked at some site and it seems they all want about 97 cents per
download. Is that more or less standard?
Where would a newbie like myself go for downloads? I like mostly Classical,
Jazz and Musicals.
There follows below a bit of a long ramble. I'd like to point out that
I'm just trying to summarise the use of P2P networks for collection of mp3
files that in themselves may or may not be copyrighted files. I am not
encouraging anybody to do anything that may be against the law!
The most popular way to collect mp3 files is via a
peer to peer (P2P) network file sharing program such as kazza or winmx, the
legality of which depends on the type of files are being shared!
The snag with these networks is that it's illegal to share copyrighted
CD's with other people & corporations such as the RIAA are trying to scare
people away from them by threatening the most egregious file sharers with
legal action.
It's perfectly legal for you to copy your own CD's to your hard drive
(called ripping the CD) & there are many good utilities for CD ripping
including Nero, Instant CD, Realone player, etc. These can be configured to
copy the CD audio wav file to mp3 format (to reduce file size) & you can
build a file of your own music in MP3 format perfectly legally.
You can then burn them to other CD's in either full audio or if you
possess a specilaist player, you could fill a CD with litterally hundreds of
mp3's & it's still legal as long as the CD is for your own use! There are
also legal site, as you've discovered that charge a small fee for each
download (although they're sometimes in formats that place restirctions on
exactly what use you can make of then afterwards!). These sites have
appeared in response to the massively popular but legally dubious use of the
file sharing networks that threaten to change the whole music industry & the
way that we buy & listen to our favourite artists!
When you have a file of MP3's to share, you can then install a P2P
client (I like winmx as it doesn't come bundled with extra spyware or nasty
advertising stuff) & designate a special folder with your own mp3's as a
shared folder so that others can access it & download files that they're
after. At this point you're breaking the copyright laws but unless you're
sharing at least a thousand files you're unlikely to be targetted for action
(even if you were sharing loads of files the chances of falling foul of the
copyright police are still pretty slim!). The music companies have been
overpricing CD's for years & despite their promises to reduce the price once
the technology became widely used, they continue to charge many times more
than the cost of production of each disk! Their arguements that musical
creativity would be killed off by file sharing is also hard to be
sympathetic to when you realise that the artists only recieve a fraction of
the net profit, the majority of which has been a cash cow for the industry
for years & one that they're reluctant to lose)
Of course, you can then use the P2P client to download files that you're
after! It's amazing how easy it is to find almost anything you could imagine
when there are millions of people on the network at any one time! In a
perfect world, file sharing is a super way to build a music collection & of
course any music you download can be left in the shared access folder for
others to share! The earliest P2P network to become popular used centralised
servers (napster) & had problems of too much demand on the servers & also
these servers were vulnerable to being shut down by legal action (which is
exactly what happened) but the popular networks of today use clever software
to source the files directly from other network users without going through
a central, legally vulnerable server.
There're good summaries of how these networks operate at
www.howstuffworks.com Check out the computer library links for the articles
on P2P & Napster & also
www.slyck.com has a good overview of all the
different networks thats well worth reading.
These networks are the real reason for the massive popularity of the
mp3 format! Because of the large degree of compression without too much loss
of sound quality, the small file size of mp3 makes it the perfect format to
transmit audio files across networks that may have bottlenecks & slow
dial-up connections as the small files transfer that much more quickly than
the full, huge audio file! Of course, once you have the mp3, there's nothing
to stop you burning it to cd & most modern burning software will re-encode
the mp3 to the full audio stream that is recognised & played by most CD
players (unless you're lucky enough to own one of these CD players that can
read mp3 directly, then you can put multiple albums onto each CD!!). Or you
can copy the mp3 format directly into an Apple i-pod or similar mp3 player
to listen to wherever you fancy! Some of these mp3 players are literally the
size of a cigarette lighter with headphones on & can hold about 64MB of MP3
which is a lot when each file is but a few MB!
Unfortunately, the P2P networks operate in the real world & despite the
ideals of sharing that they are based on, a lot of people are unwilling to
let you download if you don't have a certain minimum number of files to
share yourself or they use so called anti-leeching software to prevent
people that they think aren't deserving of their precious bandwidth, etc!
Although on the whole most people don't find too much bother & with a bit of
searching will end up with the files you want, you do meet some arseholes
like anywhere else on the net, or in the real world for that matter! I use
the winmx P2P client (see Slycks guide for download) & although a bit
daunting at first, using the default set up & experimenting for a while will
reap dividends & it's actually much easier to use than it looks. Don't be
put off if the first few attempts don't work; it's often like that but keep
trying & you'll get a result. Once you get the hang of it, you'll discover
lots of ways to tweak it to maximise the chances of positive results & speed
of downloads, etc. In the long run, it's well worth it as not only will you
amass a colection of your own favourite music but you'll be contributing to
a network of equal peers, sharing music amongst each other (to the big
corporations chagrin!) in a manner that many believe is a precursor to the
future way that music will be sold!
It's certainly one of the hot-topics on the net & in our modern,
evolving culture & it's certainly a great deal of fun to boot! Sorry for the
long ramble but I wished that somebody had taken the time to summarise all
this for me as a newbie (which I still am, really) as I'd have dipped my toe
into the P2P experience much sooner than I eventually did!
Have fun & hope that this has been of some help to you! Tim
