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Music technology
OK, I'm tired of lugging around twenty-year-old cassettes simply because I like one or two of the songs on each of the albums. I don't even listen to cassettes (partially because my car stereo eats them), but I can't bear to throw them all out.
Obviously it would be very expensive to replace every one of them with the analogous CD. I'm a cheapskate. Plus it's a low-density solution: on each CD I would still like just one or two songs. There has to be a better way.
So... what about those MP3 players, for which songs can be purchased one at a time? Question for the LJ brain trust. What do you use? What are the foibles and strengths of the player(s) you've chosen? What's your experience with the various ways to purchase music for them? Does anybody out there have a really wide selection of MP3s for sale, or am I faced with the (quite possibly illegal) prospect of taking a tape like Bobby McFerrin's "The Voice" and hand-recording it? What's your backup technology for your chosen system?
[Edits:
1. The stuff I want (for example, Bobby McFerrin's "The Voice") is not available from iTunes. Is there a bigger site, or at least a weirder site?
2. My car does not have a functional cassette input.
3. Anybody out there doing backups?]
Obviously it would be very expensive to replace every one of them with the analogous CD. I'm a cheapskate. Plus it's a low-density solution: on each CD I would still like just one or two songs. There has to be a better way.
So... what about those MP3 players, for which songs can be purchased one at a time? Question for the LJ brain trust. What do you use? What are the foibles and strengths of the player(s) you've chosen? What's your experience with the various ways to purchase music for them? Does anybody out there have a really wide selection of MP3s for sale, or am I faced with the (quite possibly illegal) prospect of taking a tape like Bobby McFerrin's "The Voice" and hand-recording it? What's your backup technology for your chosen system?
[Edits:
1. The stuff I want (for example, Bobby McFerrin's "The Voice") is not available from iTunes. Is there a bigger site, or at least a weirder site?
2. My car does not have a functional cassette input.
3. Anybody out there doing backups?]
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My gut feel says it should be legal, as I've paid for the music itself and am quite willing to toss the cassette once I've made the conversion. However, some tickle deep in my memory says that at least at one time, such conversion was in fact illegal, even for one's own use. Sounds like I'm out of date on that.
Which player do you use? Can you use it with your car stereo somehow, and if so how? Do you also purchase individual songs sometimes? How easy have you found it to be to rip MP3s from cassette?
Sorry for the third degree... I'm trying to take advantage of being a late adopter by asking all my friends what they've learned. :-)
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We have a Rio Volt SP100 (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B00005A1KZ/002-5911755-3413610?v=glance), which is no longer in production. We use a cassette car adapter if we want it in the car. We bought it a few years ago when we were driving cross-country.
I've never bought MP3s online. I've only ever used my own library. We haven't done any ripping from cassette, but you should be able to do it if your tape player has a line out, and your soundcard has a line in hookup. You'll need software to actually do the ripping. I'm not sure what would be best that way. I use Music Match to rip from CD and to burn them to CD.
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There are tons of options for MP3 players, but I would kind of lean towards the Apple iPods (doesn't matter if you're Mac or PC, they're great either way and synch perfectly with both) One reason I like them is there are so many out there, if you ever needed help there should be lots of people to offer assistance, etc.
For purchasing, legally, you might just download a copy of iTunes, again, it works perfectly on Mac or PC and will synch with your iPod. You can buy tons of songs for just $1 each and I think they've got discounted prices for complete albums as well.
Hope that helps!
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iTunes sounded WONDERFUL until, last night,
There's no subscriber fee to the iTunes thingy, right? Just the per-song (or per-album) charge? (That would make it a lot better than eMusic.)
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As for backups, yeah, you'd keep a copy on your desktop machine and another copy in your MP3/iPod player.
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If you're interested in the ipod, they just released the fourth generation, and the prices are way down on those, plus, all the leftover 3G ones are over on overstock.com for pretty cheap too.
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Everyone--from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a civil-liberties advocacy group--seems to agree on one point:
"It's perfectly legal for you to make copies of your own music for your own personal use," says Robin Gross, EFF's staff intellectual-property attorney. "It's called 'fair use.' It's your legal right to do so, even if the copyright holder doesn't want you to."
An alternative to the MP3 player -> car audio system hookup is an MP3-CD player - you can put quite a lot more songs on each CD in MP3 format. Can't recommend it since I haven't used one myself, but at least it would bypass the need to plug the portable player into the cassette adapter and fiddle with its separate controls.
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MP3 info from the LJ Brain Trust
yes the icon give a hint of what I think of it (I love it!)
I do have the cassette car adapter in the car and I plug it into the iPod
headphone jack. It is easy to use and set up (even on the windows side of things).
My only drawback with it is that the battery life (before recharging) is 8 hours. The
new 4th generation iPods which are just out the battery life is 12 hours. Mine is the 15gb size
and I am not even close to filling it, but to give you an example I have 23 hours worth of
music on it already. I works great for the trip up to and back from Petaluma.
For downloading I use iTunes (which makes it easy to load songs into the iPod) and I
use emusic.com. iTunes you can buy individual songs for 99 cents and with emusic it is
a subscrition (I think it is 8 bucks a month with 50 downloads, its
As far taking music from your tapes that should be easy to do, and is legal. There
is part of the Electronic....and then I can't remember what the name of the law is
that states you can make a "back up copy" of software, music etc. so taking stuff
from one media and converting it to another, as long as you paid for it originally, is
legal.
If you have any other questions let me know
Re: MP3 info from the LJ Brain Trust
You use both iTunes and emusic? Just the guy I need to ask! Why both? Which one is better for what?
Have you ever done the cassette copy? Sounds like a pain, but maybe it's worth it for stuff that's hard to find...
Re: MP3 info from the LJ Brain Trust
Sorry I didn't get back to you till now. I have new kids, plus my weekly session with Christy.
Anywho. All of the MP3 data is backed up on my normal computer back up schedule. Plus I have put most of it on CD that I have burned "just in case". So far it hasn't been too sizeable an investment since I have been taking those one or two songs of my CD and placing it on the iPod.
I use the iTunes music store for the most part due to a larger selection of main stream stuff (and some off the wall stuff like Dick Dale and the Deltones). It has more 80s stuff and more of the sound tracks to movies I like. I use emusic to download those off the wall numbers. Plus there seems to be more of a classical music selection on emusic. So far between the two I have managed to find most of the stuff I tend to look for.
I have done the casset copy and the first couple of times it was a pain but once you get moving it seems to work ok. I do have to admit that if there is only one song of a cassette that I want I usually just buy that one song. 99 cents vs. work of getting one song off the cassette is worth it.
I haven't tried some of the other services yet. I might try legal Napster at some point just to see whats up with that. I also think that Sony has something out now.
I wish I had the article at hand but "Cargo" magazine compared the download services and I think it was in the July/Aug. edition. Will go hunting for it and I can give you the song totals on some of the major services.
If you have anymore question drop me a line.
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The RCA Lyra seems small compared to other mp3 players on the market. Do you keep some stuff on the computer and just download chunks to the Lyra as you want them? Sort of like loading a rather large CD into a CD player? :-)
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Like you, I am about to make the jump to a MP3 player. As you likely know, I am a long-time Apple user, and naturally will go with an iPod. There's three ways of playing an iPod (or other MP3 device) over a car stereo: if your car has a cassette deck, use an adapter ($10-$15, I guess) from the headphone jack that goes into the deck and actually plays through the tape heads. These work very well, and are the cheapest option. Another way (which I will most likely use) is with a device such as the Griffin iTrip, whick plugs into the player then transmits an FM signal to your car radio. These devices have mixed reviews, particularly in areas with a lot of population and radio station density, such as where you are. I have read that Monster makes one that is very good. The last option is to use a line-in if your car stereo has one. Unless you have a plug on the front of your unit, or like rooting around under the dash, this is probably a job for a car-stereo installer. There are also CD players for cars that play CDs of MP3s, which actually read the compressed files.
That covers the auto options. As for tune aquisition, most everything I have is ripped from my CDs. The online stores are supposed to be perfect for a la carte shoppers like yourself, though. I have converted some cassettes, and it is a bit of a job involving recording, editing, and encoding, generally taking about 3x a long as the actual material you want to convert. Sound quality can be iffy, too, depending on the durability of the tape. I did about 6 or 7 cassettes, then said "screw it" and started looking on eBay for CDs. I'd much rather spend $3-$4 on eBay for a CD than go to the hassle of ripping a cassette (or vinyl) to MP3. This kind of audio editing is what I do, and it is a pain in the butt for me... it would be even more frustrating to a noob.
Hope this all helps!
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You and I can compare notes on the joys of making the leap! I am particularly looking forward to playlists.
Mmm, didn't know anyone was still making the FM transmitters. Thanks. That might be what I go with, since my car does not currently have a functional cassette player. Next time I upgrade my car stereo (or the car!) I may get either a line-in jack or an MP3-CD-capable unit.
Thanks for the heads-up about the frustration level of converting cassettes. Some of this stuff I'm afraid I can do no other way, but at least I know to go the used-CD route when possible. That's a help. Thanks!
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There is an LJ community called "ipod" that i peek in every now and then. There's been a few threads in there about the transmitters, and most of the people who have problems with them live in the Bay Area.
I'll still do a cassette or LP every now and then. For instance, around 1984 or so Prince had a satellite group called The Family (one hit single... "Screams of Passion"). They did one album and it is a favorite of mine. However, it was only pressed into CDs in Germany, and in a small quantity. There are so few of them out there that the CDs sell for about $100 on eBay. In that case, I'll convert the album rather than buy the CD.
And despite the fact that this album is long out-of-print and essentially unavailable for purchase now, and even if I could get it, there would be no benefit to the holders of the rights because of buying through a 3rd party, it nonetheless would be illegal for me to rip it and give you the files. And that makes no sense.
[soapbox] In the same way that extreme polarization in our society has ruined politicial discourse, such is the same with most discussion on digital rights issues. Both sides are unreasonably dogmatic, and real problems, such as the outlying case I cited above, become mere tools of argument and stand no chance of being realistically solved. [/soapbox]
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I am a huge fan of my iPod, because I have very flighty musical tastes. I want to listen to one band, and then a few songs later I really really want to hear something different, etc... so the ability to have ALL my music with me is amazingly useful, and for that one needs a multi-gigabyte music player such as the iPod. I used to carry a big CD wallet, exposing my originals to damage/loss, and even then, only having 20 CDs along often meant I didn't happen to have what my impulsive ears wanted next. The main disadvantage of the iPod is that it's relatively expensive, but in this case I think it's worth it if you listen to a lot of music. I could play this thing for a full week without repeating once, and it's only half full. The user interface is beautiful and intuitive, and I can find any of my 2500 songs in a few clicks.
The cheap mp3 players with Flash memory hold a LOT less, which I guess would mean you have to make up "mix" Flash cards, similar to mp3 CDs. This is exactly what I was trying to get away from, so I'm an iPod person all the way.
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Your explanation of why you like the iPod is very compelling to me. I, too, have eclectic tastes that vary quickly change with my mood. What size did you choose?
If iPods store stuff in their own format, then you can't take their contents and stick 'em on a laptop and have the laptop play them... or can you?
Do you do backups? If so, onto what? I figure it won't be long before the contents seem like a noticeable dollar amount to me. (Especially if I count the hassle factor of conversion from cassette.)
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iTunes can play AAC files (naturally), so if your laptop has iTunes you'd have no trouble playing the songs on it. With the iTunes store songs, though, I know you have to do something a little funky with the copyright protection... I think you're allowed to "authorize" the song on a few different computers, though, so it should work. And of course anything that you ripped personally would be freely transferable anywhere you wanted, and you can choose to rip to mp3, AAC, whatever format you like best. I've ripped a few things to full-quality AIFF files, which are huge but these things were important enough that I wanted the absolute full quality possible.
Hmm. Actually, now that I think of it, what my co-worker does is just plug a line-out from his iPod into his computer at work (it's a cheap and readily available cable). He plays the actual songs on the iPod, but they come out of his computer speakers. That's a hell of a lot simpler than trying to transfer anything, so that's probably what you'd want to do with your laptop if it's not your primary music storage place.
Right now I don't have any backups except the iPod itself, which is probably going to fail before my hard drive does. If the hard drive does go first, there's some third-party software that can pull the music off of the iPod -- Apple discourages it and doesn't officially support it, because otherwise people would just borrow their friends' iPods and have tons of free music. I've considered either backing up onto Ken's computer, since he has more space than he will ever need, or burning a couple of CD backups of particularly hard to recreate stuff. I haven't actually completed my small ripping-from-tapes project, so the only music for which I don't have original CDs is a few dozen songs from the iTunes store. I think the best thing to do with them would be to burn an audio CD, because that will un-compress the files and turn them into ordinary music tracks; then if I ever do need to re-rip them they will be totally non-copyright-protected, and thus I'll never have to worry about potential malfunctions in that area denying me my music! Damn, I should get started on that.
Uhh, hope this wasn't too long-winded...
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Now, the itunes *store* sells AAC - but not "plain" AAC files, they're AAC files with DRM in them. iTunes and the ipod can open files with this drm, you have some number of computers+devices that can play at any given time (and you can register and deregister them.) The DRM is called Fairplay, and it's the only reason the RIAA and the record labels let apple sell music *at all*.
Of course, there have been a number of "reactions" to fairplay - playfair, hymn, etc. These would be DMCA violations if they were published in the US.
Oh yeah - about the "US" part. I haven't tried it, but there's a site called "allofmp3.com", which is based in russia, and sells stuff unprotected, any format you want, really cheap. It's apparently even legal... *in russia*. I have no idea what the legal status of buying from them over the net from the US is... or for that matter travelling, oh, hypothetically, scandinavia, and buying stuff from there...
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Backup technology for me is primarily "everything is on the iPod and the Powerbook" with occasional pushes out to AFS; I should really burn CDroms of mp3's (effectively 10 albums per CDrom, since most audio albums don't use nearly the space anyone *and* you get about 6:1 compression) like I did back in the beginning - I've just been lazy, and 3 spinning drives have been enough (and I still have all of the original media - which I basically consider "primitive file distribution media", I haven't played a music CD directly in years.)
Another thing to consider is that it may make sense to keep the collection on a primary computer and get one of the smaller (and cheaper, but primarily smaller - deck-of-cards size or smaller) mp3 players for portable use. Think about your listening patterns/environments (walking/running? in the car? in the house?) and how much of your music you want to listen to at any point - I happen to like putting everything I own on shuffle while driving, if I'm at home I'll just play from the computer, and I don't wear headphones out walking, but do when I'm a passenger.
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Mmmmm, good thought about figuring out what my patterns are. Probably: 1) in the car 2) in the office 3) hanging out at the house. Initially I had also thought 4) out running, but I think I want better awareness of my environment on roads. Maybe 5) at the gym.
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- The Digital Millenium Copyright Act (one of the worse laws passed recently) makes it illegal to try to circumvent the copy protection on digital music. So you can buy a copy-protected CD, but not be allowed to copy it. You can possess a copy, you just can't make the copy, because to make the copy you'd have to circumvent the copy protection.
- The Harry Fox Agency licenses mechanical reproduction rights for people who want to reproduce and distribute copyrighted music in a new medium. For example, Supreme Audio gets licenses from HFA to sell MP3s of square dance records. However, this is not an issue if you are only going to keep the copies personally, and doesn't affect the right to perform them. From what I can tell, people who have claimed otherwise in the past regarding square dance callers making MP3s of records they own are simply wrong.
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Now I am working on my tape collection.
I don't use a portable MP3 player. I use cassettes in my car, but I mostly listen to books on tape from the library, or the radio, not my personal music collection.
The only music purchasing service I've used is iTunes, which is fine for my purposes.
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We sign on the web site for our public library system and reserve the CDs we want. Sometimes we have to wait a while for a new CD, and sometimes they don't have everything.
iPod backups