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Key Facts - MP3 Players and Files
See MP3 Players
There follows a brief guide to MP3 players and MP3 files for the novice.
MP3 Players
What is an MP3 player?
An MP3 player is a portable music player which has the following advantages over traditional minidisc, cd and cassette players.
- MP3 players have no moving parts - MP3 files are stored on memory cards which are solid state, or hard drives, and will not "jump" in the car or when exercising.
- MP3 players are smaller than the traditional players and will hold more songs. You can hold your entire record collection on many of the players - a 4GB hard drive will hold around 1000 songs.
- Some players are both cd and MP3 players - ie, they will play both cd's and mp3's when they are written onto a CD. Although you lose the advantage of a solid state device, you can write around 8 albums worth of MP3's onto one cd - making for example in car mp3 players a great alternative to cd autochangers.
See the links to the right for some of the best selling mp3 players around at the moment, and below for an in car player.
Sony CDX-S2250S In Car CD/MP3 player
MP3 Files
What are MP3 files?
Uncompressed sound files are called wave files. They have the file extension .wav and the average size of a wave file for a 3 minute music track is in the region of 40MB. An MP3 is an encoded and compressed wave file that is nearly CD quality but has a much smaller file size - a 3 minute music track in MP3 format would be in the region of 4MB. An MP3 file has the file extension .mp3.
Is downloading MP3 files legal?
Yes, provided the holder of the copyright has consented to the download through many of the legal download services around today. It is probably illlegal to convert files to MP3 from a CD that you own, but in practice there is not likely to be any penalty provided that the files extracted are for your own personal use. However, it is illegal to then share those MP3 files on file sharing networks.
How do I get MP3 files off a music cd?
You will need to get a "CD Ripper" program that will extract the wave files from your cd and convert them to MP3 format. There are many rippers on the market today - to try some of them visit Tucows and search on "CD Ripper". There is also a tutorial on ripping MP3 files here.
How do I burn MP3 files to CD?
Nero cd writing software is a good tool to use for this purpose, and often comes bundled with the cd writer that came with your computer.
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