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Shortly, a 1 minute near-cd quality WAV sound takes up 12 MB, which means it's not practical to store ordinary songs in it (30-40 MB per song!). MP3, however, takes up only 1 MB per minute. Note that you'll need a Pentium to play these sounds in full quality. A bit more technical explantion... MPEG Layer 3 is an audio format that produces highly compressed files
while sacrificing very little audio quality -- perceived
frequency response and signal-to-noise ratio are retained. As a
gross over-simplification, MP3 works by removing inaudible
information. Compression ratios of up to 12:1 for stereo files
can be achieved with very little degradation. MP3 enables you to play full CD quality songs with your Personal Computer ! |
There are tons of players, for any OS of any kind. I'll recommend here for a player for Windows95/NT - If you are looking for MP3 players for other platforms, please check out the MP3 - Links section.
Winamp has a good looking interface (reminds of
a stereo), and is easy to use.
A few things, such as stereo/mono, quality,
buffering and whether to minimize to system tray,
can be configured. At the Winamp main screen
you have the ordinary play, stop, pause, adjust
volume and fast forward/backwards functions.
This screen also shows file number, name, sound
quality, time elapsed/remaining and a spectrum
analysis (can be turned off). |
| Direct MP3 Songs Download |
Here are some selected songs I've collected, all placed on an amazing server which I give all credit, you can download those
songs by just clicking them and save them. There are not "Top songs" or anything like that.. just some songs I like. ;)
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| FTP sites - help |
You can get songs almost from anywhere - IRC channels, FTP servers and from the WWW. FTP is the recommended method to get MP3 files because it is, most of the times, the fastest way, although it is a bit more complicated. In order to download files from an FTP server, you'll need an FTP client, the recommanded one is CuteFTP. OK, How to understand the FTP server information ? |
OK, Explanation : The same with any other FTP info - if you see something like this : "ftp://mp3@mp3:123.456.789/" it means, mp3/mp3 is the login name and password, and the IP address is 123.456.789 - That's it. Don't forget to Upload too when you have the time, even if it's a leech site! |
| Is it legal ? |
Distributing songs and sounds on the Internet as MP3 is in a legal grey zone. Some companies allow only samples (e.g. one minute per song) of their material distributed, others think it's ok, while many spend time and money trying to stop it. For example, the Recording Industry Association of America has hired people to surf the Net constantly looking for copyright violations. At the moment it's not a big problem, but that could change in the future when we'll get virtually unlimited bandwidth etc. |
| MP3 - Other Resorces |
Please note that those link might won't work ! I'm not responsible to those sites, and please don't email me complaining. ;) Thanks. |
The included playlist editor lets you create lists of
songs that automatically will be played one after
another. Kind of like a CD - no need to open each
song manually every time! The editor has most of
the features you need, such as sorting, a
randomizer and ID3 tags support.