Guide to Digital Audio

This time around, my column is more of an article than a review. I’m going to be talking about the subject of digital audio, which, as you may have noticed, has garnered significant press lately.

First, a brief explanation of the format the makes it possible, and popular. By now almost everyone is familiar with the word “MP3.” But what does that actually mean? Well, I’d like to say that it’s simple, but it’s not. Those three characters stand for MPEG1, Audio Layer 3. In short, the way it works is that whatever program is used to encode audio into MP3 format identifies sounds that are beyond the range of human hearing, and removes them, significantly reducing the file size.

Songs in MP3 format are not only popular for their size, but their quality. The quality can be measured by the bit rate, which is measured in kbps. The higher the bit rate is, the larger the file will be, and the higher the quality. Although people will argue the point, “CD quality” is around 192kbps. However, 128kbps is good enough that most people won’t notice the difference. Below that it starts to degrade to the point that it is very noticeable. Many makers of MP3 players will advertise that they can hold hours of “digital quality” music. Unfortunately, there is no such thing as “digital quality,” so it can mean anything. In most cases 64kbps. If you’re buying a digital audio player, look for just one thing – the amount of memory it has. Figure about 1mb per minute of audio, so a player with 64mb of memory could hold roughly an hour of audio that is encoded at 128kbps. Still with me?

Now that you’ve got an idea of the technology, what can you do with it? Well most people either download songs off the Internet, or build a music library from their own collection. People who run or jog can also make use of the skip-proof design of MP3 players. I’ll go into each of these in detail later.

Building your library.
MP3s started on the computer, and up until just a couple years ago, if you wanted to listen to them, you needed a computer. The computer is still the center of any digital audio collection. To store MP3s, you’ll need a fairly large hard drive because despite their small size, it does add up. Now, the actual process of getting MP3s can be simple. The easiest (and legal) way to get them is to “rip” them from your own CDs. To do this, you need a ripping program. One of the fastest and easiest ones to use is MusicMatch Jukebox (Note that this was before MMJB became a bloated piece of crap -Eli). It will extract the audio tracks from a CD that you put in your CD-ROM and convert them to MP3 files on your computer. The other way to get MP3s is to download them off of the Internet. Be careful with this. Napster has been in the news a lot lately. If you’re unfamiliar with it, Napster is a program that allows people to swap music files over the Internet. At least that’s the official line. In reality, most people just go on and download copyrighted music without sharing anything themselves. However, downloading copyrighted MP3s is technically illegal, and we do not endorse it. There are numerous places to get MP3s legally off the Internet – to start with, eMusic.com, and MP3.com.

Now what do I do with it?
Play it! Computer speakers used to, well, suck. They had almost no power, no stereo, and were low quality. Now days, you can buy speaker systems for your computer that rival home stereo setups. Good names to look for in speakers include Klipsch, Midiland, Cambridge Soundworks, and Altec-Lansing. Besides good speakers, you also need a sound card. Even if you have one already, you can usually benefit from the increased quality and features of a new one. Also, as I already mentioned, a good-sized hard drive is nice to have, and adding more RAM would be helpful as well.

Take it with you.
As with any new form of media, the first portable players are usually not very well made, expensive, and hard to find. Just take a look at Minidisk, even after several years it has never really caught on. But MP3s managed to summon the support of not only the usual early-adopter companies, but some mainstream ones as well. Companies such as Sony, Phillips, Compaq, Panasonic, and RCA have all produced MP3 players. And the number of smaller companies that produce them is ridiculous. The range of styles and features is too great to make a recommendation for any one device, because it also depends on what you’re going to be using it for. I’ve had a lot of luck with the Rio line of players, made by Diamond Multimedia (Now called SonicBLUE). Diamond was the first company to make a widely available portable MP3 player, and they have a lot of experience. The latest edition to the Rio line is the RioVolt – an MP3 CD player. The difference between a regular CD player and an MP3 CD player is that the MP3 CD player can read CDs that have MP3s recorded onto them. This means that instead of holding 74 minutes of audio, like a regular CD, an MP3 CD can hold about 650 minutes, or approximately 200 songs (depending on what bit rate they are encoded at).

Conclusion
Creating a digital library with MP3s is not necessarily the easiest thing to do, but digital audio is the next big thing in the music industry, and the advantages are tremendous. Everything from being able to play hours of music off of a single CD to using a portable player that is entirely skip-free, lightweight, and small. What to do with this great new technology is entirely up to you.