<<Anybody else been playing with MPEG3 audio? It's an encoding scheme that gets very good quality sound at about 1/10 the size of uncompressed sound of basically the same quality. 16 bit stereo, 44 KHz sound runs about 1 meg/minute, so you can get whole songs if you've got a fast net connection, or are willing to wait a bit. With ISDN you can stream audio live with the right player.>>
I've tried it out. There is some good stuff out there. I had only heard one song by The Verve, and now I'm desperate to find the CD (used, hopefully). This area is so lame even the CATS stores don't carry it. The quality, if played through a decent stereo connection, is not perceptably different than CD. Incidentally MPEG 2 and 3 are used by DirectTV for their satellite broadcasts and they claim CD quality sound or better.
<<The best players I've seen so far are MacAmp, and SoundApp. SoundApp uses the MacApp engine, but it displays status while it plays, whereas MacAmp currently has no user interface. A word of warning though: MPEG3 is really CPU-intensive. Probably a 60 MHz PPC 601 is a bare minimum, and you won't be able to use your machine for anything else then. You can feel the slowdown a bit on my 120 MHz 604, but the machine is still quite usable. Hopefully they'll be able to optimize the code a bit more so this isn't a problem. Or else, maybe I'll get a 533 MHz processor upgrade. :) >>
There's a program called MacPlayer that I found on IRC that is basically somebody's hack of MacAmp. Also, I think the newest versions of MacAmp, although still Alphas, have an OK UI. Not much different from the PC version. Speed isn't much of an issue on my system. A 200Mhz 604e (even with only 256K L2 cache and 32 megs of RAM) is very adequate for it. I haven't honestly tried doing anything else at the same time, though..... One good thing about the Mac is that running things like this doesn't impact your disk performance. My 266Mhz PII system slows WAY down....primarily because EIDE is processor intensive, and WinAmp is processor intensive AND uses EIDE quite a bit. Doing anything on Windows really really slows way down. It's scary.
<<If you do a search in altavista for "link:mp3", you can turn up scads of files. This is a bit of a copyright violation, so buy the CD if you like the song! These sites tend to get shut down with regular frequency, because the recording industry isn't entirely happy with this trend.
Maybe with a few more MP3s, I can decide whether to go to the POPMart concert, eh?>>
I'll have to try that search. There are a ton of sites on the net... but you're right, you really only get a file maybe 1/10 of the time. No biggie. I say buy the CD if you like it. Then you can make personal MP3's all you want.
One other thought I had: CD-R's go for about $300, and disks are about $1. You could fit 120 or so 5 minute MP3's on a CD-R. Hook your computer to your stereo system with some good cables, and you'd have the equivalent of a 10-15 CD changer ON ONE CD!!! What a great way to archive personal song lists and stuff. That's about 12 hours of music.
