By Tikkler - April 24, 2000

I spend hours of my time on my computer. For a lot of you, that might seem pretty normal, but it also might sound like way too much time on the computer for some of you. Well, this is what I do, and I enjoy doing it. It does, however, get pretty boring after a while, so what do I do to keep myself amused? I've got a surround sound speaker system just for my computer, and no, it's not there just so I can hear someone sneaking up behind me when I'm playing a game of Quake III. It's there so I can be fully immersed in the music that I listen to almost 24/7. No, I'm not just talking about regular audio CD's, I'm talking about the wonderful world of digital audio on the PC.

This is achieved through a technology called MP3, short for MPEG Layer 3. Many of you might have already heard of this, but I know there are some of you who haven't. So, let me briefly go through the technology behind it. Digital audio is HUGE. A regular song lasting about 4 minutes would take up an eye-popping 50MB of disk space without compression! Nowadays, with hard drives for computers reaching 13GB to 20GB capacities as norms, you might think that 50MB is not a lot, but let me put it this way: it would take more than 5 hours just to download that 4 minutes of music with a regular 56K modem. Now do you see the problem? This is where MP3 comes in. MP3 is a compression technology, which means it will take that 50MB file and compress it into a 4MB file with very little loss of quality. That means that instead of waiting 5 hours on a 56K modem, it would now take about 20 minutes--it's still a lot to ask for, but it's a whole lot better.

Another benefit of digital audio over conventional CDs is that you can create HUGE collections of your music, and browse through them with a few simple clicks of a mouse button. Sure, you could do the same with, let's say, a 200-disc CD changer, but it would take hours just to sift through all of them to find the track you're looking for. MP3 technology allows you to extract the tracks from those 200 CDs and store them in one, easy to sift-through location. Now talk about convenience!

So, you've heard about how wonderful and useful MP3 technology really is, now what do you do? In this beginners' guide, we'll take you through the steps so you can get digital music pumping out of your Windows-based computer in no time. But before we jump in, we're assuming that you have a Pentium-classed computer or faster with a descent amount of memory and hard disk space available as storing and playing MP3's can take up a fair amount of disk space and processing power (even though they're only a few megabytes each, use of MP3 technology can get addicting). Also, make sure your computer is already properly configured to play sounds.

Oh, one last thing. Since MP3 technology has been under a lot of fire from many groups (something about people not buying CDs and just downloading MP3 files free off of the 'net instead), we're including some legal stuff to protect ourselves. Here goes:

You are allowed to obtain MP3 files ONLY if you already own that piece of music, otherwise, it is considered copyright infringement and you are exposing yourself to legal problems. Neither myself, OnePC.NET, or anyone from OnePC.NET shall be responsible for any legal issues pertaining from your use of this article.

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