MP3 for Music Educators

by John Kuzmich, Jr.

October, 2000 SBO Magazine

The Internet is huge for sharing information. But Internet information takes up substantial space in hard disk drive storage, as well as time viewing the information over the Internet. Sending a 60-minute CD music recording over the Internet using a fast modem takes about 36 hours. You are familiar with digital sounds that exist as .wav files on a compact disc in an uncompressed computer recording. A single .wav file generally takes up about 10 megabytes (MB) per minute in stereo, which makes it too large to store on your hard disk. It would be even more unrealistic to post music to Web pages or send it to others over the Internet. However, it is now possible to compress digital music in a way that takes up a lot less space – without compromising sound quality – and at the same time offers longer musical playback examples. Today, there are a number of alternatives to the large .wav file format. The most popular compression file format is the MP3, which is the focus of this article.

MP3 file format stands for Moving Pictures Expert Group or MPEG-1 Layer III. MP3 file technology is eight years old and was originally designed for inclusion with compressed video. MP3 is the first audio format to come along that allows decent audio fidelity within a reasonable bandwidth. In the past, doing music in the telecommunications world was limited to MIDI because of the bandwidth. Once .wav audio caught on and was incorporated into most MIDI recording programs, the medium was no longer limited to keyboard players. The bandwidth used for transferring .wav audio files over a phone line still has limited access.

MP3 is very “hot” on the Internet right now because there is an incredible library of MP3 music files available for free in all genres of music. You can also take music from CDs you own and convert them into the MP3 format. MP3 file format is an excellent way to put music on your Web site and share and distribute music over the Internet. When I posted a 1.13-minute stereo recording of myself jamming on clarinet, the original .wav file was 16+ MB. When I converted it to MP3, it became only 517 KB with high quality stereo fidelity! This compression is greater than a 25:1 reduction without affecting the quality of music sound. This is a good example of how MP3 makes music on the Internet far more functional for music educators. Without MP3, audio files are too large to post or use on the Internet. With music presentations so essential for music educators, this article will educate you on MP3 and why it is so important on the Internet for promoting instrumental music programs and their students.

A Fast Way to Use MP3 for Music on the Internet

In order to play back MP3 files, you need a computer with speakers or headphones and an MP3 player, which is a software program that reads the file and transmits the sound to the speakers. If you have Windows 95 or 98, you already have the Windows Media Player, a program that can interpret a number of sound and video formats. Be sure to download the latest version at www.microsoft/download.com because earlier versions of this program could not play MP3 files. Another free shareware MP3 player is Winamp by Nullsoft. Winamp is only a player like Windows Media Player – they cannot encode MP3 in order to burn CD-ROMS. If you download later versions of Netscape, such as version 4.74, MP3 players are included in the plug-ins as part of the download. Most shareware programs are basic, no-frills viewers for a wide-range of audio and video formats. For example, Windows Media Player can play CD audio tracks, MIDI files, .wav files and videos in MPEG, QuickTime and AVI formats, among others.

There are some powerful music players for purchase that do even more. Virtuosa Gold by AudioSoft is more than just an MP3 player. Besides doing everything that Windows Media Player does, it can convert songs from your CDs into MP3. MusicMatch by Jukebox for Windows is an all-in-one audio file player, encoder and CD. There is a free version, but without the ability to encode MP3 at the audio quality rates. Sonique by Mediascience is a graphically impressive MP3 player software program. The version on the CD-ROM is free for your use. Macintosh users don’t have as many options when it comes to players. The most popular one is MacAMP.

Inside of an MP3 player, such as Windows Media Player (version 7.0), you have numerous tape recorder-type controls. As one might expect, the PLAY button starts a song, the PAUSE button pauses the song, and the STOP button stops the song. After stopping, the PLAY button will restart the song from the beginning when clicked. Dragging the slide box across the Seek bar skips through sections of the song. Dragging the volume-control bar to the right will increase the volume and dragging it to the left will decrease the volume. Most MP3 players support drag and drop. This means that after you’ve started the program, you can drag the icon for an MP3 file from a Windows Explorer window – from the desktop or from any other file icon display – into the program window to play the song. You can just leave a window open displaying your song files.

If your music starts sounding choppy or stutters a little, it means that your player is having problems keeping up with the music. This usually happens if you’re running some other program that is using up processor and hard disk time or if you’re using a computer that’s too slow.

Where to Find and Download MP3 on The Internet

MP3.com is the best known and most active of the free and legal music sites (www.MP3.com). It boasts thousands of artists offering tens of thousands of tracks, resulting in hundreds of thousands of downloads every day. Emusic, located at www.Emusic.com, is the leading commercial MP3 download site. The price is generally 99 cents per song, charged to your credit card. You can also purchase the entire album at a price of $8.99. AMP3 at http://AMP3.com allows you to download free music from hundreds of bands. In addition, there are advertisements attached to each song with a short ad clip. RioPORT is a site run by Diamond, manufacturers of the Rio portable MP3 players, at www.rioport.com that has a multitude of music genres as well as news and comedy. For more information about MP3 Web sites, go to Audible.Com at www.audible.com/mp3 and MP3now at www.MP3now.com. Those sites sell mostly spoken-word recordings, but also offer plenty of free samples, including complete stories.

Making MP3s

Making your own MP3 files is easy. Soon you’ll be taking every CD, LP and cassette that you own and transferring them to MP3 format. Or better yet, consider posting analog recordings of school music groups and individual students to your school Web page to better promote your school music program. In 1998, making MP3 recordings required two steps but today, with newer all-in-one MP3 programs, you can read the song from the CD and encode it directly—ripping and encoding in one process without ever writing a .wav file. If you use MusicMatch or Virtuosa Gold, you can convert your digital recording directly to an MP3 file.

Streaming vs. Downloading

For Internet music listening, there are two ways to post music: streaming and downloading. Streaming audio is when you listen to audio at the same time it is coming across the Internet, without storing it on your hard disk. The MP3 file format, however, based on downloading, is when the entire file is saved on your hard disk and then listened to. The RealAudio format and RealPlayer are software applications for streaming audio. But the dividing lines between the two types of audio format are blurring. As the play link on MP3.com shows, MP3 files can be used in a streaming manner on high-speed lines (or with low bit-rate MP3s). Some of the MP3 encoders and players can also create and play back real/audio tracks. Streaming would be best for school Web sites so that student performances will be easy to listen to.

Not all music comes on CDs. Your school groups will frequently produce music originally recorded on cassettes. Even though cassette recordings are analog, they can be converted to digital. This process is called digitizing the music. In order to do this, you will need a computer with a sound card. Sound cards have a mini plug, 3.5mm, similar to a headphone plugged into a portable cassette or CD player. You need to connect the cassette player to the “line in” plug on your soundcard. Be sure the cable connecting the cassette to the soundcard is not excessively long, and don’t confuse “line in” with the microphone or the speaker output. Be sure that your computer’s sound card is set for stereo. Next, adjust the volume control for your soundcard to no more than about 3/4 of the maximum volume strength. Windows already comes with a sound recorder built-in, called Sound Recorder. It comes free with Windows 95 and 98. Sound Recorder is a simple program that works well. You can adjust the audio resolution to 11KHz (telephone quality), 22KHz (radio quality) or 44 KHz mono or stereo (CD quality). You can also manipulate the sound file by speeding it up or slowing it down and you have control over the volume in and out. You can also apply effects such as adding echo or reversing the sound. You might also consider obtaining a dedicated digital-audio recording program such as Cakewalk Pro Audio 9 by Cakewalk or CuBase by Steinberg. Many soundcards come bundled with good recording programs for people who are trying to convert their cassettes and LPs to digital music for CD and other computer software applications. Easy CD-Creator Deluxe edition by Adaptec, for example, includes recording software that will help you automatically get rid of the hiss and rumble from those analog recordings as well as the ability to digitize old LPs and cassettes. Easy CD-Creator frequently comes bundled with CD burners. Note: A .wav file in CD-quality resolution takes up to about 10 MB per minute of stereo recording. So your posted audio files need to be rather short even though you will be converting them to MP3. Before you compress your music, you’re going to have to decide how much to compress it. Compression is measured in how many KB the compressed sound takes up. A bit is the smallest unit of computer data, able to hold either a 0 or a 1. A KB (kilobyte) is 1,024 bits, about enough space to store a short sentence. Most of the MP3s you’ll find on the Internet are compressed to 128 KB, which means it takes roughly a MB to store a minute of music. This rate provides fairly high quality, which some people refer to as near-CD quality. Some encoders like MusicMatch, Virtuosa Gold, AudioCatalyst from Xing (http://www.xingtech.com), Winamp etc., will compress .wav files to MP3 at different compression ratios. You need to listen to the compressed file and decide which ones meet your audio expectations and if a higher compression ratio is still desired.

Promoting with MP3 on the Internet

Naturally, your first step on the Internet is your own Web page, which we discussed in the June 2000 issue of SBO, which can be accessed at www.sbomagazine.com. But there are other places on the Internet where you can submit promotion material for more distribution. MP3.com can convert your MP3 file into a real audio file and play it on one of its Internet radio stations. All you have to do is give them permission to do it. Since MP3.com also breaks down the larger genres into smaller ones, you could find your electric blues music played on its electric blues station, and your jazz band or concert band or orchestra on its corresponding radio station. It is even possible for you to find your music group being played on several different Internet radio stations at the same time. And MP3.com does all the work for you. All you have to do is upload your MP3s and let the site operators know that you want your music to be played on various Internet radio programs. Or, you could send a CD recording. MP3 can be a great way to promote your school music groups and students. It normally takes up to 40 minutes to send a song to MP3.com over a standard 56K modem. If you send a CD, MP3.com will not return your CD, but will keep it in its library in case it’s necessary to re-encode the songs. If you don’t have an audio CD, are your tunes on DAT, ADAT or some other format? There are many companies that can inexpensively burn an audio CD for you from these and other formats. Smart music educators will get their technology-oriented students and parents recording and producing compact discs. With MP3, there may also be opportunities for posting music excerpts on your school Web page.

More Web Sites for MP3

Napster makes software that enables users to swap digital music files over the Internet. Download the file-sharing software at www.napster.com, then let others record your files and vice versa. Napster has chat boards, MP3 searches, and the ability to “hot-list” other users with similar music tastes. Napster’s recent near-death experience before a San Francisco judge made one thing very clear: File swapping on the Internet is alive and well. The following site will lead you to eight additional places you can go to trade music and anything else: www.zdnet.com/anchordesk/stories/story/0,10738,2609933,00.html.

Portable MP3 Players: Music on the Go

You can take your digital music on the road with a portable MP3 player. Using solid-state memory, these players have no moving parts and can be used while you’re doing activities that would normally result in skipping. With a collection of MP3s on your computer, you can download play lists to the portable player quickly, then change them at a whim – unlike playing CDs, which are permanent. You need to look for three things in a portable MP3 player: memory, transfer speed and good software. With more memory, the tunes play longer. While the best players now have 96 MB of internal memory, you don’t want to settle for less than 32 MB. For transfer speed, look for a USB connection. Players that use parallel or serial ports to move files between your computer and your player can leave you waiting up to a half hour to load music. When choosing software, look for something simple and intuitive. Adaptec is a company that produces several outstanding software products for both Mac and PC platforms that can copy MP3 files to your CD-R or transfer to an MP3 player.

Today, there is a new technology that vastly improves MP3 players, eliminating the need for a hard drive-based player. It is the MyTrip (www.easybuy2000.com), which is now a very affordable portable player that can play both regular audio CDs, CD-Rs and CD-RWs filled with more than 160 MP3 files. This unit makes memory a non-issue when purchasing an MP3 player. With this player, you can burn 650 MB worth of MP3 tracks, which is more than 10 hours of near-CD quality without the high cost of flash memory using only two AA batteries. It provides many features, such as a user-friendly interface with stereo headphone jack, a line-out jack to connect to your car player, a digital LCD that displays track number, track minutes elapsed, play mode and battery level along with a Dynamic Bass Boost System (DBBS), which allows users to choose from five preset EQs: normal to a super woofer. In addition, it provides up to 500 seconds recording capacity for memos or reminders. The bottom line is that users can enjoy more than 160 MP3 songs per CD at a fraction of a cost of hard disk drive MP3 players.

The Future of MP3

The revolution of compressed digital music is here. MP3 just happens to be the most popular compressed audio file format. Many companies are working on competing standards, and not just little minor companies either. IBM, Microsoft, Yamaha and Lucent Technologies are all pitching their own audio compression schemes because there is big money to be had in developing the scheme that becomes popular. All of these new schemes include systems to copy-protect the files so that record companies would be able to sell you compressed music that would work on your player, but would not work on someone else’s player. Compression schemes are also competing on quality and getting the same quality audio into less space or better quality out of the same space. One of the downsides about MP3 is that someone holds a patent on it and aims to collect money from everyone making encoders. Currently, the Internet is something that everyone is talking about and many people have access to. It may well be true in the days to come that the Web, phone, and TV may be converging into what will end up being a single data tube that will be able to receive and send all sorts of signals. If that happens, that will change the way we access many things that are essentially data, music included.

Computer hardware is constantly becoming cheaper. CD players are less than one tenth of what the first ones cost. In the last 20 years, the price of computer memory (RAM) per byte has dropped nearly 100 percent as well as being more compact, faster and reliable. Audio CDs can actually hold up to about 74 minutes of music. Burning your own CDs with MP3s can hold nearly 10 times as much music as a standard audio CD. Ultimately, it may be possible to play a 100-plus song MP3 CD in your car, or on a home 10-hour CD player. We truly live in exciting times for music educators. The public relations potential of this new technology and hardware is very exciting. Soon CD players will be able to handle both formats: standard CD audio tracks and MP3s. This means you can listen to hours of music from a single CD. You can add some “live” tracks of your music groups without having to have the groups professionally recorded. Do it yourself. But the significance of this is that your students and parents can be actively involved in this process if you involve them. Some of these people might even be in a position to donate computer hardware as well.

We even have portable MP3 players now that can record and compress your compact disc music recordings so that you can download music from your PC and carry it with you anywhere with up to 12 hours of music on each CD. Music is becoming more accessible than ever before. As music educators, we have golden opportunities to promote our students and music groups with compressed MP3 files in a world where information technology, consumer electronics and telecommunications products incorporate increasingly sophisticated technologies and where the need for timely available standards is as strong as ever. MP3 provides a proven mechanism to feed research results into our teaching.

MP3 is changing the way people produce and listen to music because you can now distribute music over the Internet in many creative ways. A wide variety of musicians are using MP3s on the Internet to promote their music. Music educators should join the MP3 bandwagon and jump on school Web pages to promote their students and music groups. You can also preview recordings before purchasing them via the Internet and download them into your classroom, home and/or office.