MP3. It's amazing how that little alphanumeric designation can
strike fear into the hearts of record company executives all over
the world. Nobody knows whether this humble audio file format
presages the utter demise of major labels, but it assuredly signals
some significant changes in the way people listen to and purchase
music. Unless the majors drastically modify their business model,
they risk becoming modern-day dinosaurs. Whether they are too large
and unwieldy to adapt to the brave new online world remains to be
seen.
In the meantime, your band can do its part to fuel the
controversy. If you have your own Web site and a CD to promote,
it's a fairly simple operation to post MP3 versions of your tracks
online. Eliminate the middleperson! More power to the people!
Subvert the dominant paradigm! Or just get your music out there to
be heard.
WHAT'S THAT NOISE?
Like any other sound file, an MP3 is simply a bunch of audio
data on a computer. What makes it special is how the player
application interprets and processes that data — an MP3 can
store an enormous amount of sound using very little space. It
produces good sound quality, a hi-fi rendition of the original
audio, without the loss of clarity or additional noise that plagues
so many other compression algorithms. The compression ratio is
pretty good, too — better than ten to one. That's like
sticking a bouillon cube into an oven and pulling out a roast
chicken dinner. How do they do that?
The trick is to encode just what's discernible to the human ear
and throw away the rest. After all, there's no point in wasting
precious file space describing frequencies only a dog can hear.
MP3 compression works like this: First, the format slices the
original audio file into short segments of a few hundred
milliseconds or so. Then, a mathematical equation called a fast
Fourier transform (FFT) finds the frequencies present in each slice
and their relative volumes. Psychoacoustic principles determine
which of those frequencies humans can hear; the ones we can't hear
get tossed.
Guess what? It works like a charm. I like to think of the
original 16-bit, 44 kHz CD audio file as a marble statue, a hefty
chunk of data you and your studio have carved into a desired shape.
An MP3 file derived from the track is like a thin plastic cast of
the sculpture, painted the same color. They're nearly identical,
but one weighs a lot less than the other. Obviously, the plastic
facsimile will be far easier and cheaper to mail than the big block
of stone.
INTRODUCING THE RIPPER, JACK
The format's popularity has spawned a plethora of file
conversion utilities designed to copy CD tracks and create MP3
files. These programs are known colloquially as rippers —
partly in defiance of the record company powers-that-be, who feel
as though the entire process is cheating them.
For people like you and me, who aren't rock stars or industry
executives or entertainment lawyers, getting ripped off (or ripping
somebody else off) is not really an issue. We're not creating
bootleg sites or trying to take money out of James Hetfield's
pocket; we just want to post an MP3 of a song our band spent many
hours rehearsing, recording, mixing, and mastering. For us, rippers
are a godsend, allowing us to publish our music in ways never
before possible.
I use a program called AudioCatalyst. It costs about $30. You
can download and purchase it (Windows 95/98/ME/NT 4.x only) from
RealNetworks (www.real.com/accessories/audiocatalyst). But you
can choose from plenty of other shareware and freeware programs,
all of which do an adequate job of copying the audio from your CD
and writing an MP3 file onto your hard drive (see Fig. 1).
Just search the Web for the word ripper, and you'll find several
different software utilities.
One parameter you'll run across when making your MP3 is the bit
rate (a number that determines the amount of data processed per
second). How you set this number affects the final size and sound
quality of your file. In general, when converting CD tracks, you
should set the bit rate to 128 kbps. If you're converting in mono,
you can use a 64 kbps bit rate without loss of quality. You can use
lower numbers, resulting in even smaller file sizes, but audio
quality degrades as you lessen the bit rate. Sharp transients such
as snare hits get fuzzy; eventually a strange electronic bubbling
could pervade your track.
SIZE MATTERS
One thing you must take into consideration is the size of your
files. Although an MP3 takes up much less storage space than a WAV
or AIFF file, it's still bigger than the average text or photo
file. If your ISP hosts your Web site, you probably won't have
enough room to put up much in the way of sound. Most ISPs provide
less than 10 MB of space; if you consider that each minute of
MP3-encoded music takes up about a meg, it becomes apparent that
you can put up only — at most — two full-length
songs.
One solution to this problem is to post excerpted versions of
your tunes. Or for $25 or so a month, you could pay a dedicated Web
hosting service to carry your site; the 250 MB or more provided in
such an arrangement should be enough to post your entire collected
works.
HEY, HEY, MR. POSTMAN
Once you have your music in MP3 format, publishing it is simple
— you just upload the file to your site's server. From there,
you can give users access in any number of ways. The simplest
approach is to put the MP3s in a directory and let users pick and
choose. A more elegant method is to put a page on your site
pointing to the files. A simple HTML hyperlink like this one will
do the trick:
<A src=“
http://www.myBandSite.com/MP3/theNewSingle.mp3
”> Click here to play the New Single MP3
</A>
That usually causes the browser to go to a new page or open a
new window, which you might not always prefer. A more sophisticated
and complicated method is to use <embed> or <object>
tags to attach the music to its page. The music will start to play
as soon as the page loads. Visitors can look at lyrics, credits, or
pictures of the band while they listen.
You needn't be a code wizard to put cool pages together; most
Web design programs (like Macromedia's Dreamweaver or Adobe's
GoLive) can create hyperlinks and handle embedding for you. But the
way each system deals with your downloaded file varies according to
the user's browser and platform. Example: Say I click a hyperlink
to an MP3 file. On my PC, Internet Explorer fires up Windows Media
Player to stream the file; playback begins almost immediately. But
my aging Mac must download the entire MP3 to my hard drive before
QuickTime can play the song.
LISTEN UP!
You may not have as much control as you'd like over how your
pages look and act on different machines — but at least you
can be confident that the music will sound good, will download
quickly, and will play for an audience that's actually interested
in what you have to say. The potential audience for your music is
enormous, much larger than any local radio station could hope for
(although many of these are now reaching a worldwide audience
through Webcasts). Potential is the key word, however — you
have a lot of competition out there, and this is where the big
record companies retain an edge. With huge budgets for advertising,
promotion, propaganda, payola, and outright mind control, the big
boys can still dictate what people will listen to, whether on a CD
or on the Web.
So even though you've posted the MP3s on your site, your job's
not finished. You should also put them on every “bands
online” site you can find, starting with MP3.com and
IUMA.com. Keep your e-mail list updated and push your site
mercilessly. Display your Web address on mailers, on the flyers you
post in record stores, and on the CDs you sell at gigs.
In short, do whatever it takes (within the law, of course) to
get people to come to your site and listen to your music. The only
way you'll ever actually become a big-time star with a big-time
recording contract is if people can listen to your music. That's
the true power of the Internet and MP3s. You may have to shout, but
you can make yourself heard.
Peter Drescher is a composer, a sound designer, and the
owner of Twittering Machine, a project studio in San Francisco. He
maintains his Web site at www.twittering.com.
onstage•hotlinks
www.iuma.com
The Internet Underground Music Archive lists unsigned bands along
with MP3 tracks of their music.
www.mp3.com
This is the premier Internet site for posting MP3 files (and the
source of much controversy).
www.mpeg.org/mpeg/mp3.html
The site contains everything you could possibly want to know about
the MP3 format.
