Mac Daniel's Advice

MP3 and the Mac, Part 1

Korin Hasegawa-John - 2002.05.14

Now that Napster is dead and the RIAA is attempting to put tighter controls on CD use, you might wonder "Is the 'revolutionary' MP3 audio compression scheme dead?" Not by a long shot. (Alternatively, you might wonder "What in the world is MP3, and why is/was it revolutionary?" - read on.)

MP3, for those who have been living in a fallout shelter since about 1998 or have been obsessively avoiding the news since then (or just those not interested in music and CD burning and everything else) is a compression format. It can compress a CD quality song into about 1/8 to 1/10 of its original size without very much loss in quality. Basically, this means that you can store 8 times more data in the same place. A 70 minute CD holds about 650 MB, whereas in MP3 format it would be equivalent to 65-80 MB depending on quality.

Now back onto the main track.

Unlike Napster, MP3s are alive and well. Their use has changed slightly, however. Now MP3s on the Mac side of things are primarily used for storing a person's CD collection on their Mac. They are also used for creating custom CD mixes. The most popular MP3 player and encoder on the Mac is iTunes, which is available free from Apple. iTunes allows you to burn custom CDs from your MP3 collection using a CD burner. A third use of MP3s is to carry large amounts of music on the move with an MP3 player, such as the iPod or Creative's Nomad series.

MP3 files can still be downloaded over the Internet using software such as Mactella, Furi, or LimeWire. All of these clients use Gnutella, which is a peer-to-peer file sharing service. Peer-to-peer means that there is no central database of files, making this type of service much harder to shut down. Napster functioned with a central database, so when this database was shut down, the service was rendered useless. A downside of peer-to-peer is that finding files is much slower. There was a recent Mac Daniel article on these clients, What Is Gnutella?, so I won't address this.

Once a group of songs is encoded to MP3 (called "ripping"), a CD can be burned with it. iTunes is the easiest software for this. To make a new CD, just create a new playlist and drag the songs you want to the list. The playlist should not exceed 60-70 minutes, depending on the capacity of the CD-Rs (called "blanks"). Your blanks should be labeled with their playing time.

A note about burning and blanks: If you're buying new blank CDs, name-brand CDs work the best and most consistently. They tend to be more expensive, but in the long run they are more cost effective because fewer are wasted. Recommended brands include Memorex (my personal favorite), Sony, and Maxell. Blank CDs are compatible with different speeds. In general this isn't a big deal, but if you have a 24x burner and try to use 12x compatible CDs, they'll be toast unless you burn at the lower speed. You can change the speed at which your burner will burn CDs. In general, set this to the fastest possible speed, but never go beyond the top speed of your blanks.

Once you have assembled your playlist, pop a blank in your drive and just hit the "burn CD" button in the upper right corner. (You have to hit it twice, a safety feature.) After a while, depending on your Mac's speed, the number of songs, and burner speed (in general, 8-35 minutes, since the computer must decode the information before writing it to the CD). Your CD will be ejected as soon as it is finished, and before doing anything at all, grab a Sharpie and write something informative on the CD - not just "Mix" or "Mix 1," but something like "Mix 1" and then "incl. Blink 182, Counting Crows, Simon and Garfunkel, and The Beatles," for example. I have a lot of discs that I have no idea what is on them, so it's a good idea to start out labeling.

After you've diligently labeled your new CD, it's time to test it. If all goes well, when you press "Play" it'll work, and you'll be rocking (or swinging, or funking, or whatever) to your own custom CD. Have fun, but keep it down so the cops don't come. ;-)

Next time: MP3 players, the Mac and MP3s.

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