Do you have a large CD collection that you play a lot? Do you have a newer computer with good speakers, and a large hard drive? We can show you some tricks you'll love! We'll show you how you can improve your listening experience, using some really cool tools: Improving the sound of music played on your computer a new CD player program to replace the boring Windows Media Player a program that will convert your CD's to mp3's, so you can store them on your computer First, even if your computer came with good speakers, you can improve the sound of your CD music by sending the sound to a stereo system instead. This way you can play CD's from your computer at the volume they were meant to be played at ... loud .... without distorting the sound. This just requires a cable with the correct ends, and a stereo system that will take input from an auxiliary source. Send the sound from the speaker jack on the computer (where your speakers were plugged in) to the 'AUX-IN' plugs on your stereo. Making yor computer play through a quality music system will improve the sound you get immediately. But wait ... there's more! The Windows Media Player is OK,but feel free to upgrade to a fancier player ... one that will play all types of music, even CD's. It's WINAMP, and here's a sample version: I said 'sample' because what you see is completely changeable! The style of player can be changed using different 'skins', just like you can change how you look by changing your clothes. There are literally thousands of different 'skins' you can get for this player, ranging from hundreds of typical stereo system looks (like the one at the left), to hundreds of specialized ones, themed to TV shows, musical groups, or movies! WinAmp comes with 3 or 4 skins, but at the site you can download as many more as you want ... they're all free! You'll notice that the player is extremely functional! You can control playback volume, start, stop, pause, and there's an equalizer, frequency meter, and a zillion other controls. It also plays mp3's ... more about that later! The WinAmp player can be set to become your default CD player instead of MediaPlayer. It will also play .wav and .mid files, of course. The program is totally free. Even better, it will let you listen to music online for free, without downloading the songs; ,,, WinAmp uses 'streaming' technology, which means it plays as it downloads, so you can go to a music site and listen to cuts from newly released CD's instantly, by playing a streamed MP3 version of the song! Here's the link to the WinAmp Home Page, where you can some more skins too. A Hint: get the player first, unzip it, and run it. While it's open, go back online to the WinAmp site (www.winamp.com) and try downloading skins. You'll discover that when you choose a skin to download, it automatically installs itself too ... you don't have to do anything! The new skin will appear on WinAmp, and will also be listed in its 'skins' menu. If you choose to download them separately, though, when WinAmp isn't playing, be sure to put them in the WinAmp 'Skins' folder, and don't unzip them! O.K., now the fun part. You can convert all of your favourite songs from your CD's, or your entire CD collection, to mp3 format, and store them on your hard drive. Why would I want to do that, you ask? Well, WinAmp will play these directly from your hard drive, which means they load faster, and you don't have to keep changing CD's. More importantly, you can make playlists out of just your favourite songs, so that you don't have to listen to the crummy songs, only your favourites! I have transferred my entire CD collection to mp3's on my computer, taking only the very best songs from each CD, and storing the mp3's in different folders by music type. Each of these folders can be made into a playlist (by WinAmp), so that I can open a playlist of, say, Rock & Roll Music, and WinAmp will play them all, one after the other, or 'shuffled', and I never have to change a CD! No more plastic cases, and fumbling CD's in and out of the drive. No more CD storage problems! Everything I want is on my hard drive! These songs can also be downloaded from your computer to a stand-alone mp3 player. These players usually come with their own conversion software, so you can rip songs directly from your CD's to the player. Mp3's are compressed versions of CD music files. A song on your CD takes up on average about 50M (that's megabytes), but an mp3 is only about 5! My collection, comprised of about 200 CD tracks from all of my CD's, uses up only about one gigabyte of hard drive space. All of my songs are instantly accessible ... if I want to play a certain song, I just open it from the playlist. No searching through stacks of CD's! Other advantages? Well, WinAmp lets you display song names and artists. You can also email your favourite songs to friends (but only on their home email ... Hotmail won't allow 5M attachments) ... although this is probably not strictly legal. You can make mp3's from CD's for yourself, but aren't supposed to distribute them. A better use would be to download them into a portable mp3 player . And since it's entirely digital, you get no skips! You can also visit your favourite musical artist's home page, or a music label's site, and listen to or download tracks from new CD's, as mp3's, to sample the music before you decide to buy the CD. Or just keep the mp3's! Although each mp3 is somewhere around a 5M download, the music is often free And as we mentioned above, you don't actually have to download it at all if you just want to listen to it, since it 'streams'.

Computers | Science | Worsley School

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