The audio CD format is twenty-two years old—one tenth of one percent the age of an average redwood tree. Isn’t it time we replaced it with something better?

Thanks to the modern miracle of the Internet and compact, compressed audio files, we are doing just that—at least if we accept the word better to mean “store more of it in tinier places, but with inferior sound.” Here are some of the products, technologies, and web sites that allow even non-musicians to rip, burn, and otherwise express ourselves creatively.

Generic Terms
.mp3: The file format that moved music into the arena of the Internet. .mp3 files use lossy compression, meaning that it throws away some of the sound to make a smaller file. Unfortunately, it never seems to throw away the drum solo. Similar formats, like .wma and .m4p, are also lossy, but have the distinct advantage of not allowing you to play your music (see Rights Management).

Rights Management: A body of technology, supported by a body of congressional lobbyists, designed to make sure that your spouse is not allowed to hear music that belongs exclusively to you.

MP3 Player: A small, pocket-sized devise onto which you can store digital music so you can listen to it while walking, driving, and having a conversation. Thanks to MP3 players, we can all be like movie stars, living our lives with a constant musical soundtrack to remind us how cool we are. Unlike movie stars, these soundtracks rarely include effects, so you won’t actually hear that out-of-control truck.

Rip: The act of copying music from a CD onto your hard drive. The word was coined for this use by dropping the suffix “-off.”

Burn: The act of putting music that you have ripped back onto CD, so that you can carry less of it in a clumsier medium.

Line-In: The port you must use to transfer music from an analog source, such as a phonograph or tape cassette, to your hard drive. This is a particularly tricky job, since your turntable and tape player are in the living room and your computer is in the den. One solution is to buy a notebook, which will not have a line-in port. You can get around this problem by plugging the sound source into your notebook’s microphone port, if you don’t mind music that sounds like Edison’s original phonograph—before he invented the needle.)

Tags: Information stored in .mp3 and other audio files to describe the music. After you rip or rerecord music, you may need to fill in such information as the song title, originating album, artist, composer, lyricist, original lyricist, and the original lyricist’s cat. You must also pick a genre, deciding if a particular tune is Rock, Punk, Acid, Acid Rock, Acid Punk, Hard Rock, Soft Rock, Classic Funk, or Rock and Roll? These are surprisingly difficult choices for a Brandenburg Concerto.

Ear Buds: Small headphones that you insert inside your ear, replacing the annoyance of a metal band over your head with something far more uncomfortable.

MP3 CD: A CD that can hold ten times as much music as a standard CD, and can be played almost nowhere.

Commercial Products
iLunes: This popular music web site by Kumquat Komputers offers hundreds of thousands of songs for 99 cents each. Getting onto iLunes is easy—you just download and install the free software, turning your computer into an iLunes jukebox while disabling every other media player (and a few non-media applications for good measure). Once you buy a song, it’s yours…as long as you don’t try to listen to it on another computer or on an .mp3 player not approved by Kumquat.

Kumquat iOdd: The only .mp3 player approved by Kumquat, which by coincidence also manufactures it. The iOdd is also the most popular .mp3 player, thanks to a unique technological breakthrough called “heavy advertising.” This was also one of the first .mp3 players with a hard drive, allowing you to carry close to a thousand hours of music in your pocket and play nearly an hour of it before the battery dies.

The Old Trapster: A once-popular web site that allowed people to give complete strangers access to their hard drives—an idea that many believe was inspired by the widespread sharing of toothbrushes. Trapster was primarily used for sharing music and attracting lawyers.

The New Trapster: A commercial music site similar to iLunes, but with a name that suggests you’re getting something for free. Trapster recently announced a new subscription service; for $15 a month, you get to listen to the radio. You can think of iLunes and Trapster, the two major players in online music retail, as the Tower Records and The Wherehouse of the 21^st century—assuming that a CD purchased at Tower only played on a Tower CD player registered to the person who bought the CD.

MusicSnatched: This clever site solves the iLunes and Trapster problem of having two incompatible music retailers. Now there are three.

EmptyTunes: Yet another retail music site with a strange and unique business model—it’s not incompatible with anything. You can play the songs you purchase from EmptyTunes on any computer with any media software, and on any MP3 player. You can even put the songs on multiple computers and multiple MP3 players. The catch? No one that you’ve ever heard of would dream of selling their music on EmptyTunes.

© Copyright 2005 by Lincoln Spector