Make mp3s from CDs

If you have Windows Media Player on your computer you can make mp3s from audio CDs. First make sure it is set up to rip CDs into mp3s. Open Media Player and go to Organize/Options and then Rip Music. You'll then see Rip settings and Format. Select MP3 which will be the smallest file size and standard sound quality of 128 Kbps. At the bottom click on Apply and finally OK. Next put an audio CD into the computer tray and click on Rip CD at the top. You should see Unknown album just below that and to the right under Title all the tracks that are being ripped or copied with the Length or time of each track, Rip status, and Contributing artist and under that Unknown artist which will be the folder name that you will find in the Music section of your computer after all the tracks are ripped. Finally after taking out the CD you can change Unknown album, artist, etc. as well as the titles of  your new mp3 tracks to their actual names.  

What is mp3?

What is mp3? mp3 is short for MPEG Audio Layer 3 and is a patented digital audio encoding format using data compression. An mp3 song of about 3 MBs (megabytes) in size that you can download with your computer or phone was originally a 30 MB wav file that was first created by recording the song in a studio or live music place. MPEG stands for Moving Picture Experts Group who are experts working with the ISO and IEC to develop international standards for digital audio and video compression. And speaking of video, an mp4 or MPEG-4 is a compressed high quality video file...a 2-hour mp4 movie video is about 800 MBs while a DVD movie is over 4GBs (gigabytes) or 4000 MBs!

For much more info go to the following:

Moving Picture Experts Group from wikipedia.org 

What is mp4? answered by neema s from answers.yahoo.com

Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) from scholarpedia.org

The 2013 Oscars Best Original Song Nominees

Five tunes are Best Original Song nominees for the 2013 Oscars held in Hollywood California at the Dolby Theatre Sunday, February 24. They include Adele's "Skyfall" and Walter Murphy and Seth MacFarlane's "Pi's Lullaby" from "Life of Pi". MacFarlane will also be hosting this 85th Academy Awards broadcast live on ABC starting at 4 pm Pacific and 7 pm EST. For more go to www.spinner.com and www.oscars.org . 

Current iTunes Song Prices - February 2013

There are currently 3 iTunes song prices: $.69, $.99, and $1.29.
You can get special 69 cent songs and the featured free single of the week from iTunes.

Bonnaroo 2013

The 2013 Bonnaroo Music And Arts Festival is on this year for June 13-16 in Manchester Tennessee and tickets will be on sale from www.bonnaroo.com Saturday, February 23 at 12 noon Eastern time.

2013 Grammy Awards

The 55th Grammy Awards was held at the Staples Center in Los Angeles Sunday, February 10, 2013.
For complete information go to www.grammy.com .

Making MP3s Using Live Recordings

I recorded a friend's band using my Sharp MD recorder and Sony condenser microphone. I stood more on the right side than the ideal middle because the other spots were already taken so naturally the recording came out louder on the right side which I fixed later at home using Soundforge software. After inputting the entire recording through the analog jack of my computer into Soundforge creating stereo wav files and making sure the levels were high enough to hear without clipping or distorting, for each one I did the following:
1. Process at the top
2. Channel Converter - Name: Stereo to Stereo-Pan center, use Right channel only
Output channels to Stereo-New left channel 65% / 50% New right channel 50% / 50%
and pressing the OK button.
Finally, after normalizing all, I saved them as wav files and then converted them to mp3s with a free converter that I downloaded from download.com.