What's All This MP3 and iPod Stuff About?

Here at "Take The Defaults – Dude" we make a tireless effort to cut out all the crap that tech-nodes would give you to describe something. Why, because I have kids and senior citizens who ask me questions about this stuff. And since I have to be the resident tech-node in my house, I do my research and share my findings.

Does anyone remember 78's? do you know what a 78 is? A 78 is an old format for a record. The 78 refers to the number of times the record would spin in one minute. That would be 78 RMP – rotations per minute. There were also 33's and 45's. You could get more on a disc the slower it spun. But the quality wasn't so great. Remember all the scratches you could get and lint would settle on the record?

So then someone decided to invent an 8-track player. It was good. You could get more on the cassette, but it had those awful "thunks" when the channel changed. Remember you could choose between 4 different channels? Each channel had a right and left track. So 2 tracks times 4 channels equals, you guessed it, 8 tracks.

But the 8-track was short lived because cassette tapes came along. Cassette tapes were much better. You got the same music with descent quality in a smaller package. Notice the trend is always toward better quality and smaller size. That is a rule in the computer world.

But the medium – or stuff that music was stored on – was still volatile and not easy to quickly access. If I wanted to listen to song number 5 and I was on song number 1, I had to fast forward past songs 2, 3 and 4. Or I had to do some gyration and rewind to an unknown spot and flip the tape over.

And quality was still questionable. The source was analog, which is like a telephone call, in waves. By this time digital was popular and could offer a better quality.

I know we are taking the long way around the block, but stay with me, because we are almost to MP3's.

What was needed was something small, something with high quality and easily manufactured. Enter the Compact Disc, better known as the CD. The CD offered a tremendous leap in technology and it had all the sexy qualities of technology, small, easily produced and digital. I remember hearing the 1812 overture in early 1983 at an electronics store. They taped a cotton ball to a string and attached it to a speaker and played the 1812 overture. I had never heard anything that clear and the little cotton ball nearly flew off the speaker when the cannon shots arrived.

It was awesome. So someone wanted to put movies on a disc. How great would that be? But this time, technology was behind. The VHS tape was very popular and cheap to produce but had the problems of the cassette tape.

"So the Germans," as Stephen Ambrose was fond of saying, invented a way to put movies on a computer. It was way too expensive to produce and computers were way too weak to support it. The group formed to study this was the Motion Picture Experts Group – better known as MPEG. And they eventually turned movies into files called MPEG's.

We're almost there.

With the coming of age of computers in the 90's people had more options when they customized their computer. They put pictures and sounds on the computers. But the sound files were really big and took up a lot of room. Then two ideas were married. What if we take the sound file ( also known as a WAV file ) and squish it down to a smaller size and try not to lose the quality of the file when we squish it? And we'll use the sound part of the MPEG movie to do it with. That sound part of the MPEG movie is referred to as "Layer 3" and it's been shortened to MP3!

And that's how we got to MP3's. They are simply sound files that have high quality and small size and digital. Ahhhh, our magic formula!

Time for questions.

So now I know what an MP3 is, what do I use to play them?
As far as hardware goes, you need a computer, car stereo, PDA or an MP3 player. A computer running Windows or Macintosh's operating system will have software that plays the MP3. Through some technology magic, MP3's can be put on a CD and played in a car stereo that plays MP3's. PDA's and MP3 players are very similar. A PDA is one of those little hand held things that is like a little computer. Consider it a mini-computer. An MP3 player does only that. Play MP3's. One of the more popular you have seen on TV is Apple's iPod. The iPod is the second coming of the old Walkman. The iPod did for MP3's what the Walkman did for cassette's and making music portable. But the cool thing is that the iPod has fewer moving parts and can store a WHOLE lot more music than a cassette. Try a couple of days worth of just playing music. Some people are using them to make their own small time radio stations and broadcast them across the internet. They are called Podcasts.

You can also create your own CD's with some software and a process called "ripping". Ripping is pulling songs off of a CD and putting them on the computer in the MP3 format.

Where do I find MP3's?
Well … there are legal and illegal was to get the music and just as much debate over the same issue. You can buy digital music – another name for an MP3 or similar WMA – at Walmart.com, Napster.Com, or Apple's iTunes.com. There are also other file sharing networks that are known to let users trade files over the internet. These are the illegal downloads you hear about.

How much does it cost to invest in these MP3's?
Most MP3's only cost about a dollar a song. Isn't that convenient? You can get just the songs you want for about a dollar a song. A whole album is about $10.

How much do MP3 players cost?
An iPod will run you $200 - $400 dollars, but you can put just about every song you own on it and listen to it, at will, in any order or categorized or randomized. Cheaper models of MP3 players will run about $100 but store far less music. They are really made for the person taking the short walk or lunchtime exercise. The strength of the iPod is that it is so versatile. It can connect to a computer or to your home stereo or car stereo. The down side, in my opinion, is that you really need Apple's software to run it. The software is free, but I guess it's the principle I don't like.

See these articles referenced for the history of the MP3.

A Histroy Of MP3's

MP3 Definition