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The Sound and the Fury: MP3 Players If you followed either of the two links I posted last week you would have noticed that there is a lot of shareware and freeware available for your Macintosh. In fact, there is so much shareware and freeware available that it's hard to tell what you should even bother downloading. Fortunately, I'm here to share my opinions on various shareware offerings. Of course, nobody says you have to agree with my opinions, but hopefully they'll help steer you towards the more useful stuff. I'm going to be talking about MP3 software this month, but first, I'll briefly describe what an MP3 is for anyone who doesn't already know. Everyone else can go to the next paragraph. An MP3 is a file containing compressed audio that can be played on a computer. They are a very popular way for people to store their favorite songs on a computer. MP3s can have close to CD-quality sound, and take up much less disk space than regular CD audio. Unfortunately, MP3s have been a source of controversy for quite some time. Most record companies have feared MP3s because people have been able to download their favorite songs, or even entire CDs, from the Internet without having to buy the CD. The record companies feel that MP3s have the potential to seriously hurt their sales, and it is a violation of copyright laws to download or distribute most MP3s. On the other hand, most people who download MP3s don't feel that they are doing anything wrong. Either way, I'm not going to lecture about morals and laws here, for I have more important things to talk about.
How do you play an MP3 on your computer?
The most basic way to play an MP3 on your Macintosh is to launch QuickTime Player, go to the File menu, select Open Movie..., find an MP3 on your hard drive, and click the Convert button. Then you can listen to the song using the regular QuickTime controls. If you have a current version of QuickTime, this will work with any MP3 you can find and it will play them just great. Unfortunately, if you want to listen to another song after the first one ends, you have to go into the File menu again and open up a new song to play. This would be a great way to play MP3s if you are just staring at your computer screen and waiting for songs to end so you can start a new one. In the real world, people usually want to listen to music while they're doing other things on or near their computers, and most people don't want to manually select each song every time a song ends. Fortunately, for those people, an MP3 player can help them.
SoundJam MP
Let me start out by saying that I think SoundJam MP is the best MP3 player available for Macintosh. Why do I think SoundJam is the best? Well, SoundJam MP puts very little load on your computer's processor, skips the least, and has the most features. Is that good enough? SoundJam has all the basics you need in an MP3 player. Like most MP3 players, it lets you create playlists so you don't have to keep opening new songs like you do with QuickTime. Instead, you just put the songs you want into a playlist and SoundJam can play the whole list. You can make and save multiple play lists, so you can pick one that fits the mood you're in. It might make sense to think of a playlist as a custom CD full of songs you picked, but it's on your Hard Drive instead of being an actual CD. SoundJam gives you all of the functionality of a stereo with volume, balance, bass, and treble controls. There is also an optional graphic equalizer for people who want to tune their music, and SoundJam gives you repeat and shuffle buttons too. There are too many features to describe in much detail, but I want to mention a couple. SoundJam has a converter that lets you turn songs from audio CDs into MP3s, and you can automatically get the names of the songs online so you don't have to type them in yourself. You never have to tire of the way SoundJam looks, because there are many skins available. Skins totally change the appearance of SoundJam, so you can pick a look that you like. There are two versions of SoundJam available. SoundJam MP Plus costs $40 and can be downloaded right from the SoundJam website and has all of the features activated. I think it is worth the $40 and I use SoundJam MP Plus almost everyday, but I know that's a lot of money to spend before you know what you're getting. Fortunately, SoundJam MP Free is the alternative. SoundJam MP Free has all of the basic MP3 player features you need, but some of the cooler features are only available on a trial basis for the first 14 days. This is a good way to see if the extra features of the Plus version are worth it or not. If not, SoundJam MP Free will always work as a basic MP3 player, even after the 14 day trial period.
Where do you get MP3s? Good question. An MP3 player really would be quite useless if you didn't have any MP3s to play. The most reliable way to get MP3s is to encode them yourself from CDs you own. That can be done with the Converter in SoundJam MP Plus or any other MP3 converter available. However, I've found that some other MP3 converters tend to put funny high-pitched squealing or scraping sounds into some songs I've encoded. The point is that not all MP3 converters are created equal, and you should try several before spending any money on one. MVP, to name one, was not a good converter when I used it a few months back, but perhaps it's been updated and improved since then. The other way to get MP3s is to download them. Unfortunately, the web is like a library with all the books lying on the floor; you have to search through lots of junk before you find what you're looking for. That's where Napster is useful.
Napster
Napster is a file-sharing utility designed to let users share MP3s with each other. You enter a song title or artist, and Napster will search all other online Napster users and list the songs they have available that match your search. Then you can download the songs that look interesting to you. It's pretty simple. You can also make some of your own MP3s available for others to download. It is a very quick and simple way to get virtually any song you can think of. Napster also happens to be free to download and free to use with no strings attached, but I hear that Napster will have a monthly fee in the future. If that doesn't happen, it's also possible that Napster will be shut down because of their ongoing lawsuit with the record companies [Editor's Note: Napster has been nearly shut down several times, so there is no guarantee that it will be up as you read this]. Before either of those things happen, it's worth taking a look at. I think Napster is most useful for finding rare and live recordings that aren't normally available. With regards to legal and ethical issues, I could write an entire column on that, so instead I will leave it for you to decide. One frustrating thing about Napster is that you are counting on the people who created the MP3s to have done a good job. Many of the MP3s on Napster are recorded low-quality, are incorrectly named, or don't have the full song. It's really frustrating to spend an hour downloading a song from some guy in Rwanda who's on a 14.4 modem and then find out that it wasn't even the song it was supposed to be. Fortunately, Napster provides you with some useful information before you download anything, so I'll tell you what to look for. You want the frequency to be 44100 Hz because that's what CDs use, and anything less is noticeably lower quality. Also look for a bitrate of 128Kbps or higher. To help ensure that your download is the song you think it is, compare the song lengths, and make sure the one you're downloading is about the same length as other copies of the same song. Finally, don't attempt to download from someone who's ping is 'timeout' or really high (above 300ms).
Other MP3 Software SoundJam Free and Napster should be enough to get you started, but if you are curious to see what else is out there you might want to go to VersionTracker and do a search for 'MP3'. You'll see that there are dozens of MP3 players, encoders, alarm clocks, and other utilities available. MP3 Players are applications that play MP3s and generally allow you to create lists or folders of songs to be played so you don't have to micromanage every song that gets played. Besides SoundJam MP, MP Strip looks interesting. MP Strip is a control strip module that is an MP3 player. It is less featured than SoundJam, but it is small and inexpensive, so some people like it. Encoders allow you to create your own MP3s from CDs, and several MP3 players, including SoundJam have an encoder in them. There are also some stand-alone encoders of varying quality available. DropMP3 seems to be getting good reviews, but I haven't had a chance to try it out yet. Alarm Clocks are MP3 players that you can set to start playing music at a certain time, perhaps to wake you up in the morning. It is a very good idea, and as usual, this feature is in SoundJam MP. (Basically everything is.) There are also several stand alone alarm clock programs, and alarm clock software seems to be getting more popular. I guess you can add alarm clocks to the list of household objects your computer can replace. Other utilities include Napster clones such as Rapster, and MacStar and there are also several ID3 tag editors. ID3 tags are what tells the MP3 player the name of a song and other information. Often times downloaded MP3s may be missing this information, so these editors can be useful.
To End Another Column I know that for many of you, this information may be old news, but hopefully I provided at least a tiny bit of useful information to everyone who reads this. Next month I'll be talking about software that is not as commonly used as Napster and SoundJam. Until then, feel free to email me with your comments, suggestions, and criticisms. I'll be glad to hear from you. Random Tidbit: If you've ever played Dungeons & Dragons, (pen and paper RPG, not computer game,) get on Napster and look for 'Dungeons & Dragons' by Dr. Demento. It's good for a laugh or two, and it's a pretty accurate portrayal of a gaming session. Update: Before anybody goes off and registers a copy of SoundJam MP, Apple recently released a free MP3 player called iTunes that has most of the features of SoundJam MP Plus and a much nicer interface. I highly recommend downloading iTunes and giving it a try.
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