I have a confession to make: I am an MP3 junkie. There, I feel so much better already. I have gone from shelling out a fortune on records every week to rarely buying more than a few CDs a month, entirely due to this digital phenomenon.
My group of MP3-savvy mates has morphed into an unspoken collective; once one person has shelled out for a CD, it gets "MP3'd" then emailed around to us all (it doesn't really, officer - that would be illegal, and therefore wrong). If you have no idea what I'm rambling about, good. Put the newspaper down and simply walk away. MP3 files are basically sonic crack. Just as illegal, only much, much cheaper to get your hands on.
MP3 is the name given to MPEG Layer 3 files, produced by an encoding process called "ripping", supposedly because the process involves ripping out all of the noise which is inaudible to the human ear. This allows the encoding software to compact a hefty track from a CD and compact it down to a slimline MP3 file, a twelfth of its original size.
To create your own MP3 files, all you need is a sound-enabled PC and the right software. Try Real Jukebox, downloadable for free from www.real.com/products/realjukebox. This program takes care of everything, recording the tracks from the album in your CD drive onto your PC, ripping them into MP3 files, and then playing them through your speakers. The whole process should take no more than a few minutes per track on a decent PC system. The end results are sound files which are almost as good as the originals, at a fraction of the size.
MP3 was originally hyped as though all four horsemen of the Apocalypse had rolled up at once and asked if the record industry would like to take it "outside". As the papers breathlessly reported, "the kids" were "running amuck", downloading their favourite tunes in MP3 format for free from dodgy web sites, rather than splashing out pocket money for them in HMV.
Artists like Robbie Williams and The Corrs were quoted in the press as being alarmed by the boom in MP3 downloads, as it threatened their livelihood. The industry fought back, of course, with the help of the law, closing down sites by the hundred. Now it's rare to find a decent site to download from. And the record companies are coming online soon: the Time Warner/EMI merger was a move specifically intended to capitalise on the boom in online music.
A few years ago, the fact that you could reduce a 40Mb album track down to no more than a few megabytes wouldn't really have got anyone interested. How would you have carried it around? Storage devices were then too bulky and expensive, and floppy disks aren't a practical solution for an album. Then the internet came along, and the perfect combination of application and delivery system presented itself. 1-3Mb might be a pain to download via your 56k dial-up connection at home, but hey, that's what work email addresses are for!
Nowadays if you have decent bandwidth and an understanding email system at work, you can quite easily email around your current favourite tracks to your friends (as long as your boss doesn't figure out who is regularly trying to squeeze 20Mb emails out of their inbox). If you're thinking of buying a CD and your friend has already got it, why not just get them to email a few tracks to you? If you like it, and your friends have as much time on their hands as mine seem to, you can always get the rest sent over and listen on your headphones. You don't even have to rip from CDs now; sites like www.peoplesound.com let you sample and download whole MP3 albums from unsigned bands. Listen to a few tracks for free, and if you like it that much, pay for the rest of it.
I know what you're thinking though; it's all well and good having music on your hard drive, but less fun if you want to listen to it away from your desk. Listening to music on your PC, not very sexy is it?
Well, here's the masterstroke; portable MP3 players. They connect easily to your PC, and can download an album of music in minutes. The Diamond Rio was the first and is still a good buy, although Creative Labs has promised a UK version of its acclaimed US player Nomad this year. If you are looking at buying an MP3 Player, then 32Mb is the minimum memory it should pack, being enough for about an hour of tunes. 64Mb is much better, although the next generation of players will be measuring their memory in the gigabyte range.
MP3 might have started out as a geek's hobby, but has spawned an entirely new type of "walkman", re-introduced the concept of "home taping", and forever altered the way record companies view their profit and loss sheets. Join the MP3 revolution and help terrorise Robbie Williams. Who could resist an offer like that?
