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Digitizing sound MP3 format CD-ROM |
Lang & Technology |
In this page I will occasionally add information that I come across which is related to audio stuff, such as tape digitizing, digital formats, and so on, and which may be useful to other colleagues.
Digitizing sound
For those of you who want to digitize cassette tapes or CD's or want to compress audio files, here is some advice for creating MPEG 1 layer 3 (MP3) files.
You can turn digitized sound files, such as WAV (Windows) or AIFF (Mac) files into MP3 files by using an ENCODER.
If you do not have digital sound files to beging with, you need to create them. To convert the audio files in a music CD to WAV files on your hard disk, you need what's called a CD ripper, to first turn the music files in CD format into WAV files.
If your sound source is a microphone, a cassette deck, or a record player, the WAV editor that came with your sound card -- or some shareware WAV editor, such as the very cool Cool Edit 2000 by Syntrillium -- will allow you to create WAV sound files, which then you can transfer to MP3 format or RealAudio format, which take at most one tenth the size without any noticeable quality loss. If you have a microphone, you just plug it into your sound card (in the back of your computer). If you have a stereo component, such as a tape deck or a record player, go to any department store and get a Y Adapter Cable for about $4 (3.5mm plug/2 RCA plugs), which you can use to connect the player to your sound card.
A good ripper/encoder for CD's (CD track --> WAV/MP3) is AudioGrabber (the freeware version has some minor restrictions). Also excellent and highly recommended ripper-encoder is CDex (currently my favorite encoder). Yet another is Easy CD-DA Extractor 3 (free 21 day trial, but it won't work past that). For the simplest copying of CD tracks to use either RealJukebox (by the makers of RealAudio, currently in beta) and MusicMatch Jukebox. Both are free for slightly less than CD quality recording and cheap enough for high quality recording.
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An excellent (and free) plain encoder (WAV --> MP3) is Blade Encoder. Now for this program, which runs from the command prompt, you will need (want) what is called a Front End, and an excellent free one is BladeBatch. Unzip all the files into a directory and run bladebatch.exe, select your wav files, and presto, you have MP3 files. (For other MP3 programs, go to WinFiles. Another excellent option: Electronic Cosmos MPEG Suite (WAV to MP3, MP3 to WAV, MP3 to MP3 encoding) (FREE). Also, visit the MP3 Place for all your MP3 needs: http://www.mp3place.com/.)
There are many excellent and free MP3 players out there. One great player, and until recently the player of choice, is WinAmp, which is excellent and uses very little resources (plays OK on a Pentium 100, for instance). If you want to go for something fancier, you can get RealJukebox (which I keep having problems with) or MusicMatch Jukebox, now in version 5 (see above).
Digital Sound Capture and Editing
by Jean LeLoup & Bob Ponterio
SUNY Cortland
© 1997
Digital Domain (articles, tutorials)
Up to the topMP3 (MPEG 1 Audio Layer-3)
"Without a doubt, the hottest audio format on the Internet right now is MP3 (also known as MPEG Audio Layer-3). Just as the JPEG graphics format makes it possible to enjoy high-quality bitmapped images at a fraction of their original size, the MP3 format lets you shrink the size of CD-quality .wav files by a factor of 10 or more. Now, four-minute songs can be a more manageable (and easier-to-download) 4MB instead of a modem-choking 40MB. Like JPEG, MP3 is a "lossy" compression format, but many folks can't detect any difference between a well-recorded .mp3 file and the original source."
MP3 Magic, by Ted Tatman, ZDNet, Feb. 1999 (link to article)
Other links:
- Morpheus
- CDex
- TagMaster
- MP3 Audio Guide at ZDNet
- mp3.com: Get MP3 music.
- Winamp, the player
- MP3 Manager 32
- Lyrics plugin for Winamp + Lyrics Editor by Alon Gingold
- MIR (MP3-ID3Tag-Renamer) by Mark Luetkefend
- mp3spy
- MP3 CD Organizer
"As this program uses a MS Access 97 database, you will need to have ODBC with support for Access 97 databases installed."
MP3 players
Winamp 
This has been the MP3 player of choice for quite a long time. Now free. Excellent quality and uses very few resources and thus you don't need a late-model computer (Pentium 100 is OK). I'm not crazy about the interface and the database capabilities.
MusicMatch Jukebox
"the world's first personal jukebox software - lets you record, download, organize and play digital music on your PC. Free Download!" Very nice. Excellent player. Does not choke on MP3 files like RealJukebox. I don't like the interface as much, though. Allows for viewing of lyrics stored inside MP3 files.
RealJukebox
"RealNetworks' remarkable new manager for your digital music has features that will change the way you listen to music on your PC forever" (Don Willmott, PC Magazine First Looks. May 3, 1999). Excellent database and CD and sound file player. It also records RA and MP3 music files from CD's. Too many bugs. Nice interface. It doesn't show lyrics. I have had too many problems with this program (version 1), however. I prefer MusicMatch Jukebox.