MP3 question

  • Thread starter Thread starter Ray J
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Ray J

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I hope I'm in the right forum. Be gentle if not. Here goes:

I will be making a few CDs on someone else's stand alone unit in a month or so. I will be uploading a few of the tracks on MP3.com. I've read the process of uploading on their site but still have questions. I use all hardware and do no recording or mixing on my computer. What is the difference between uploading, ripping, and encoding. Is this all the same thing, one process? I have Music Match and a disc drive. My computer is a fairly recent model Hewlitt Packard, don't know the specs but I don't have a "cable modem" whatever that is. It is my understanding that I have to upload it to my harddisk and from there encode it to MP3.com.

Can someone briefly explain the process and clue me in on what programs I will need to download to accomplish this. Or maybe which are the best or have had the least problems.

Thanks, don't worry about being condecending, assume I know nothing, and this will give you an accurate starting point. Although I've been playing music for quite a while, I could be the poster boy for the technologically impaired.... ...Ray J

[This message has been edited by Ray J (edited 07-31-2000).]
 
First of all, uploading, I believe in the sense you are speaking of it, is sending your file to MP3.com so that everyone else can see it.
Ripping: First of all, you need to know that a CD stores its information in the .wav format (or something very similar if I'm wrong). When you rip a song off of CD, it saves that .wav file onto the hard drive, so it's like any other Windows media sound file. From there, you move onto encoding. See, .wav files have a HUGE amount of information, so some brilliant guy came up with a way to compress this file without losing any significant sound quality. This compression is called MP3. A software program takes your .wav files (that you got off your CD, or any other .wav file) and converts them into .mp3 files so that they are easier to move around, and take less time to upload.

As far as progams to do this, I don't know what Music Match is. I do know there is a lot of sharware/freeware out there that can do all the steps mentioned above (no software is required for uploading). As far as commercial products go, Xing AudioCatalyst and MP3 editor etc., is what I used, but I recently saw it knocked on this BBS. Now that I've got the easy part of the question answered, the others can tell you what to get...but pretty much all you'll need is the ripping/encoding software.
 
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