Music technology

[cjsmith]

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?]

Comments

[datagoddess.livejournal.com]

I rip MP3s from my own music collection all the time. That's legal, as long as it's for your own use. We have an MP3 player that also plays regular CDs, so it's not exactly small, but it's nice on plane trips - I can load up a CD with a bunch of MP3s and never have to change it the whole trip.

MP3 info from the LJ Brain Trust

[chiefted]

Well not the cheap way to go but I got an iPod for my birtday and
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 daltong's account that we share).

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

[tsjafo.livejournal.com]

I have about 300 cassettes. I'm trying to find a way to rip them into .mp3 format. I have close to 200 CDs that I have ripped, plus more I've purchased from Napster...over 7,000 .mp3s in all. I've a little .mp3 player (an RCA Lyra, 128mb built in memory plus a 128mb add-on card) at Wal-mart that I can jack into a cassette-shaped adaptor that fits into my car stereo. I love the .mp3 format because you can do so much more with it.

[mighty-sam.livejournal.com]

Cassette-to-MP3 should not be a problem legally, so long as you do not distribute the files.

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!

[platypus]

Cassette-to-mp3 is fine and quite do-able, though the quality does not stun me so I've only seriously tried it on irreplaceable original tapes of stuff I can't otherwise obtain. Depending on how mainstream your interests are, the iTunes music store may well be selling the songs you want. Their selection is huge, but they aren't going to have an obscure 80's British indie band. They only sell songs in the Apple AAC format, though; that works on iPods, but I'm not sure how easy it is to convert them to mp3. You could of course burn a CD using the downloaded AACs, and then rip mp3's off that mix CD, and plenty of people do; it's just a bit of a pain. I also regularly buy one-hit wonders from half.com just to have the original CD, or if it's not available on iTunes.

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.

[eichin.livejournal.com]

I've had various mp3 players in the past but currently use an iPod - since I already used a mac and wanted some music for a transatlantic trip. The itunes music store is nice for buying "just that one song that's been running through my head". There are cheaper options, but there aren't better designed ones. Most of my music is still CD's bought in stores and converted. If you've got a machine with a decent sound card, there are linux tools for doing things like auto-splitting a single recording (gramofile, I think was the name, specifically has filters for vinyl, as well as "split on silence" so you don't have to sit there and do it manually.

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.

[rfrench.livejournal.com]

There is no legal prohibition against copying music for personal use, even when it means changing to a different media. You may be thinking of one of two other issues:

- 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.

[firecat]

I digitized all my vinyl into iTunes on the Mac using a shareware program and a gadget that connects my stereo to the Mac. The program and gadget together cost about $140. It would have cost me a LOT more to replace all the vinyl with CDs or even to replace all the songs I liked on the vinyl with songs from iTunes (assuming they had 'em all, which they didn't, not even close).

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.

A possibility

[lesliepear.livejournal.com]

Could you borrow the CD from a friend or library and get music that way?

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

[ambar.livejournal.com]

The music in the iPod is also on the disk of the PC/Mac to which you sync the iPod (if you delete stuff from the PC, the iPod will delete it on the next sync). So that's one backup, and whatever you use to back the PC up is a second backup. (I have a Firewire external disk at home and Retrospect backs up the laptop to it.)