What exactly is an mp3? How do you get them? How do you make them?

What is an mp3:

MP3 is a compression type developed by a German organization, Fraunhofer Institute. The reason nobody kept scads of music on their pc a couple years ago was that it was too big. See the megafux discussion on sizes if you are uncertain about what a file size means. The file types that were around then (and are used on CDs now) use about 10mb per minute of music. A file compressed with mp3 (MPEG, Layer 3) uses about 1mb per minute of music.

Addtional resources:
http://www.mpeg.org/
http://www.iis.fhg.de

How Do you Get Them?:

There are many numerous ways to get files off of the internet. You can listen to shoutcast--it's like radio but it doesn't always sound that great. And you have to be connected to listen to it.

Napster Napster Napster. Napster is a filesharing application. Napster got killed by lawsuits (as you probably know) becasue it kept a centralized database of individual songs that could be exchanged. Current filesharing tools like Bearshare, Limewire and other Gnutella clients dont' have any such central figure to sue, so don't have the limited life expectancy of Napster.

I like Bearshare, but some people swear by Morpheus and this other one called... media something--music something. There is way too much stuff available to keep track of, so I just don't. :)

You can go to http://tucows.tierranet.com/fileshare95.html and search around and check them out. Watch out for anything that installs an app called Click Til U Win. It's some horrid spyware shite that logs and sends your web actions to some scum in Vegas.

What about good old IRC?
You can leech all kinds of stuff from IRC. Get mIRC and log on to your nearest UnderNet server and go to town. There are countless megs of stuff written about how to act on IRC, so I'm not even going to go there. Suffice to say that it's a good idea to watch what other people do for a while and be polite.

How Do You Make Them?

You can rip them from your own cds. You can record them from your tapes and vinyls. I've done both, but ripping CD's is the commonest, easiest way, so that's what I'm going to talk about.

If you are on a Mac, use Toast. It is the shit, and it rips, encodes, makes CD's and pretty much wipes your butt for you.

If you are on a pc, I like MusicMatch Jukebox. It's free, it uses the high quality Fraunhofer codec and has scads of features. Apparently it will make CD's for you, but I use Nero for that cus I'm old fashioned.

Buy a CD. Rip it. Encode it.Upload it.