ChatterBank1 min ago
Music downloads
7 Answers
I am not very clever at this and need to know what exactly(simply) mp3, wma and other such files are, would prefer to be able to play to play stuff burnt to a cdr or dvd to be able to play on computer and stereo, thankyou
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Iff you want to play your music on a "normal" stereo, you will need to create an audio disc, rather than a data disc on CDR and make sure that the disc is "finalised". Most stereos will not play unfinalised CDRs, CDRWs (some won't take CDRs) or DVDs and few play mp3 music.
Unfortunately you will get a lot fewer audio tracks than mp3/data tracks per disc.
An MP3 file is a file a computer can understand and turn into music. Most computers will play MP3 files.
A WMA is a Windows Media Audio file. They are lower quality than MP3s and you get them by ripping (copying) tracks from an audio CD onto Windows Media Player.
When you want to burn songs to a CD-R the best way is to use Windows Media Player, this is very simple to use and self-explanatory. It will make you a CD which you can play in almost all CD players and computers. Some might have a problem with "home-made" CDs but this is really rare especially with fairly new equpiment.
An additional point; you might have heard of cars with MP3 CD players, or MP3 CDs. These are CDs which keep the music in its complete compressed digital form, so you can fit around 80 tracks on a CD instead of about 20. MP3 CDs will only play on CD players which specifically say they play MP3 CDs. You can only make an MP3 CD with a program such as Nero Express, not Windows Media Player.
A WMA is a Windows Media Audio file. They are lower quality than MP3s and you get them by ripping (copying) tracks from an audio CD onto Windows Media Player.
When you want to burn songs to a CD-R the best way is to use Windows Media Player, this is very simple to use and self-explanatory. It will make you a CD which you can play in almost all CD players and computers. Some might have a problem with "home-made" CDs but this is really rare especially with fairly new equpiment.
An additional point; you might have heard of cars with MP3 CD players, or MP3 CDs. These are CDs which keep the music in its complete compressed digital form, so you can fit around 80 tracks on a CD instead of about 20. MP3 CDs will only play on CD players which specifically say they play MP3 CDs. You can only make an MP3 CD with a program such as Nero Express, not Windows Media Player.
Music stored on your CDs are the full quality sounds. This is great, but they take up quite a lot of room on your computer, so if you want to take your music places in some portable music player, or even just store them on your computer, you'd better have quite a lot of room.
So, as space is usally at a premium (especially in portable players), you have to find a way to get the music on your computer, but so that it takes up less room. This is known as compression, just like taking a spring and pushing it in so it takes up less room.
One way they did this was to take the original music from the CD, and remove any noise that is not between the frequencies of 20Hz-20kHz. This is because this is the human hearing band, and so anything outside this is stuff we can't actually hear anyway. Because they're taking some music out doing this (but nothing humans would notice), it reduces the size it takes up on your computer.
Then they took this constant stream of sound, and separated it, taking out bits of sound every so often. This is like running water through your tap: it's constant. Then, slow your tap down so that it drips. Now, the key is to get it to drip, so that you're removing some of the sound, but make it drip so often that it appears to be a constant flow to our ears. This is taking out bits of music, so it also reduces the size of the music on your computer.
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So, as space is usally at a premium (especially in portable players), you have to find a way to get the music on your computer, but so that it takes up less room. This is known as compression, just like taking a spring and pushing it in so it takes up less room.
One way they did this was to take the original music from the CD, and remove any noise that is not between the frequencies of 20Hz-20kHz. This is because this is the human hearing band, and so anything outside this is stuff we can't actually hear anyway. Because they're taking some music out doing this (but nothing humans would notice), it reduces the size it takes up on your computer.
Then they took this constant stream of sound, and separated it, taking out bits of sound every so often. This is like running water through your tap: it's constant. Then, slow your tap down so that it drips. Now, the key is to get it to drip, so that you're removing some of the sound, but make it drip so often that it appears to be a constant flow to our ears. This is taking out bits of music, so it also reduces the size of the music on your computer.
...
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What I've just described with the tap analogy above is called the bitrate of the file: typically 128kbps. As the 'k' in that means 1000, this means that they're getting it to drip 128000 times every second. If you could get your tap to drip that fast, i'm sure you'd agree that it would appear to be constant (hence why mp3's don't sounds terrible to us). This also makes it obvious that the higher the bitrate, the better the file quality. the higher the bitrate, the more drips per second, and so the closer it is to the original constant flow. simple, right?
That is basically what an mp3 file does. When you want to put music from CD onto your computer, you convert it from the CD music to mp3 music. This was a format created by some independant specialists. Microsoft then created their own way of doing essentially the same thing, and called it wma. This is a slightly new format, and their way of doing the same things are a bit better and more precise, so wma's sound better than mp3's. The next version of mp3 is called aac. This is what Apple use as default for their iPods.
What I've just described with the tap analogy above is called the bitrate of the file: typically 128kbps. As the 'k' in that means 1000, this means that they're getting it to drip 128000 times every second. If you could get your tap to drip that fast, i'm sure you'd agree that it would appear to be constant (hence why mp3's don't sounds terrible to us). This also makes it obvious that the higher the bitrate, the better the file quality. the higher the bitrate, the more drips per second, and so the closer it is to the original constant flow. simple, right?
That is basically what an mp3 file does. When you want to put music from CD onto your computer, you convert it from the CD music to mp3 music. This was a format created by some independant specialists. Microsoft then created their own way of doing essentially the same thing, and called it wma. This is a slightly new format, and their way of doing the same things are a bit better and more precise, so wma's sound better than mp3's. The next version of mp3 is called aac. This is what Apple use as default for their iPods.
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