What's it all about

How to Be a Player

The first thing you need is an MP3 player. There are literally hundreds of them out there, but by far the most popular (and the best) players are Winamp and MacAMP for the Mac. So go ahead and download the program, install it, and launch it. Here's what you should be looking at:

Before you go out and start ripping off the music industry, take a few minutes to check out your new toy. Pressing Alt+3 will bring up the ID3 information. This is where you input the track information (title, artist, album, year, etc.). Pressing Ctrl+Shift+K brings up a snazzy little plug-in, which you can customize to feature all of your favorite colors. Pressing Alt+E will bring up your play list editor. Play lists can be edited and saved (hold down the Load List button in the lower right-hand corner to do this) as .m3u files. Pressing Alt+G will bring up your graphic equalizer. You can also use the right mouse button to bring up a menu for these and other commands.

Jack Your Ripper

There are two ways to get MP3 files. You can either download them or "rip" them straight from a CD. To use this second method, you need to get yourself a ripper. Again, there are hundreds of them, but my ripper of choice is the MusicMatch Jukebox 3.0 (currently available for PCs only - Mac users should check out the XingMP3 encoder). The shareware version of Jukebox will allow you to record up to five songs at a time, but if you pay the company the $29.95 it deserves, you'll have unlimited recording ability. It's all a matter of preference, but if you want to be hip like me, download Jukebox and install it. Jukebox also will play your MP3s, but it's all about preference. You can designate your MP3 player under the Options menu.

Another thing you should know is that Jukebox supports digital recording. Digital recording is the process of recording digital-to-digital instead of having the file pass through an analog soundcard. Digital-digital recording sounds a lot cleaner than digital-analog-digital, but you need a newer CD-ROM drive to do this. If you're not sure if your CD-ROM supports digital audio extraction, don't trip: Jukebox will let you know when it tries to configure your CD-ROM. If it can't do it, Jukebox will default to analog recording. After launching Jukebox, the following will appear:

Now pop a CD into your CD-ROM drive and click on the Record button. It should ask you if you want to be connected to the CDDB (CD Data Base). The CDDB is a large, online collection of album information, and if it has an entry for the CD you're ripping, it can automatically transmit the artist, album, and song names to Jukebox. Pretty cool, eh? If you don't want to connect to the CDDB, you can always type in the titles yourself the old-fashioned way. OK, your recorder should be up and running and look like this:

This is where the magic happens. Clicking on the Opt button on the recorder's will bring up your recording options. Here you can set the compression mode (128 Kbps is just about CD quality) and recording mode and select what directory you want to stash your MP3s in. Now check off which songs you'd like to record by clicking the white box next to each song name that you want. Jukebox will give you a little blue status bar for each song as it records. When each song is done, the light gray box to the right of the status bar will turn green.

It's as easy as that.