dolphinboy

I don't know if you are still around, but I'm sure we can "chat" later about how I can try and learn to download songs from those "sharing" sites everyone seems to use.

So, finally, have we agree that I should make my copies at 192 and not 128 and everything will be dandy, right?

If you had a 20 GB HD and not a ton of stuff taking up space, how many songs (estimate) would you feel safe putting on your computer?

Thank you. You are very generous.

palebluedot

Well seeing as how I am running 120GB on my computer and it is 90% full I guees I feel safe filling it up.

You could easily put 1000 songs on your drive and at 192kbps that would take up aprox 6GB of space.

I am putting a guide together for you for Morpheus. Should have it done tomorrow for you. We are in the same time zone(I'm in Boston). I will be back on...well....in 7 hours..at work. Talk to you then. Also please email me, so I have your email address to mail this guide to. Just click the email button in one of my posts in this thread.

einTier

I'll try to walk you through what I can. I have over 9,000 mp3 files on my computer taking up an estimated 40GB (I honestly don't know, when a hard drive gets full, I put a new one in and start filling that one).

First mp3 is just a file type that holds audio. It's used because the compression happens to be extremely good, as it gives a 10:1 compression (10GB of raw audio takes 1GB to store) and at higher bitrates is indistingishable from the original music. It became popular because it was the first audio compression that allowed the following:
1. Storage of a lot of media in a very small space.
2. Playing of partial files -- if you are missing the beginning or end of the file, it will still play.
3. Compression/quality loss ratio that was an acceptable compromise.

What you have on your store-bought CDs is what's referred to as "raw audio". When you make mp3s, you are pulling that data off the cd, making it smaller (compressing it), and putting it into a file that the computer recognises and can play with the right player.

Now, what you're wanting to do is store your files on the computer so you can make mix cds. I highly recommend that you go head an encode them at 192kpbs since you'll only have 500 or so files, and this will only take up about 10% of the storage on your drive. If you don't play a lot of games or do a lot of data storage, you'll never miss the space. You could probably put 1000 songs on your drive in 192kpbs before you might start missing the space. If you ever do need the extra space, the mp3s can always be deleted or burned to a CD.

At this point, I feel I should explain the difference between audio and data recording on a CD, as this trips a lot of people up when dealing with mp3 files. They see that mp3 files only take up a few megs, and the CD will hold 650, so why can't they make a disc with 100 tracks that plays in their car? Because data and audio recording are two different beasts. When you burn a data CD, the CD acts like every other piece of storage media you've ever used -- floppies, hard drives, etc. If it takes up 10mb on your harddrive, it will take up 10mb on the disc. If you put audio files on there as data files, you can put more on there, but the catch is, they will not play in your CD player. They are just a computer data file, and the CD player won't recognise them, even though in your mind "they are audio files".

Now, burning an audio CD is like making a tape. The CD does not care how big the file is, or how good the quality is, or anything except the running time of the piece of music. You can put 74 minutes of raw audio on a standard CD (80 on an extended one) and no more -- no matter what you do. This CD will play in your CD player. In fact, it is all but indistinqishable from the store bought CD. These are the kind of CDs you're wanting to make.

What I was saying above is that if you ever need the extra space on the drive, you can burn the mp3s to a DATA cd, and put a couple hundred mp3s on that disc, and then when you want to make a CD to play in the car, you can pull out that disc, and use the files from it to make a new AUDIO CD.

OK, so now that that's taken care of, how do we make a mix CD?

First, use Musicmatch Jukebox to pull the songs off the CD that you want and encode them to mp3. You can use Musicmatch or Windows Media Player or Winamp to listen to the files and play around with the ordering you'd like to hear them in. All of these programs are free, by the way.

Once you figure out what you want on a CD (make sure you don't have more than 74 or 80 minutes worth of audio), make a list. I usually just use pen and paper to make mine.

Now, use Nero to make a CD. (Nero is also free for 30 days). Select "Make an audio CD" and you can start adding the mp3s to the CD in the order you'd like to hear them. Again, you are making an AUDIO CD, not a DATA CD. The files when burned to the CD will not be mp3 anymore, they will be converted back into raw audio by Nero. Brun the CD, and you should be able to listen to it in the car.

If I have some time over the weekend, I'll try to put together a "simple guide to mp3s" in a word document. It'll include screen captures and such, and you can just print it out and follow step by step.

DVDealer

This is incorrect. MusicMatch, in addition to its ripping capabilities discussed here, is also capable of burning CD's as well (even the free version). A lot of the same people that produced drivers for Adaptec's EZ CD Creator, before it was spun off to Roxio, have worked on the burning functionality of MusicMatch's jukebox.

For another $20, you can upgrade to get a key to their plus version online and get some additional burning features:

- burn "audio" or "MP3" CD's
- multi-session and multi-tasking burning
- up to 24x recording speed
- volume leveling of MP3 files before burning.
- burns DVDs on DVDR drives.
- burn from .WMA and .WAV files as well as MP3's
- drag and drop files from jukebox playlist and system's file manager to Burner window
- "Smartsplit" feature automatically organizes and selects files to fill up the capacity of the CD(s) you are burning.
- With the upgrade get many additional Jukebox features as well.