Showing posts with label online music. Show all posts
Showing posts with label online music. Show all posts

Friday, December 01, 2006

Create a Digital Music Library

There are many advantages to creating and maintaining a Digital Music Library on your PC. You can find and play any artist or song you want easily, without having to look through a large library of CD cases. Listening to online music has never been so much fun! Even when purchasing online music downloads they are added directly to your music library! With all your music located on your PC hard drive, you’ll never need to search for that CD again. Not to mention the problem of finding the CD case only to discover it contains the wrong disk inside!

Importing your CD collection into your digital music library is easy too! Most PC music players already have the capability to import your CD collection. You will probably see this process referred to as RIP in your music player documentation. Windows Media Player provides the option to import songs as MP3 format or WMA. Either format will work with most music players. MP3 format still maintains higher appeal for most users and is compatible with almost ANY player on the market.

If you are connected to the Internet, the RIP program will gather the song titles, artist, and album information from a remote music database. If you are not online, then you have to type all that information in, so make sure you are connected to the Internet before you start the RIP process. Using an MP3 or WMA file format, each song will take about 3–5MB of storage space. A 120GB hard drive can store about 4000 CDs or so! Do you have that many in your CD collection? If so, WOW!! That's the equivalent of somewhere is the neighborhood of 20,000 songs or 80 days and nights of non-stop commercial free music!

I suggest that an external USB 2.0 hard drive be used for file storage to keep your PC hard drive from getting cluttered. Make sure you have a USB port on your PC before buying. Here are two of my recommendations. Both are high speed USB 2.0 drives operating at 7200RPM.


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Using a digital music library, you also have the flexibility to create a playlist of your favorite songs! All the songs are RIPPED individually, so you can mix and match as many songs as you like into your playlist! No longer do you have to insert the CD and then only select songs on that CD. Need more cool reasons to switch? There are plenty, but it can also be as simple as searching for one individual song by name or artist. You can find the song within seconds...

And how does all this SOUND to the ear? Well, you can connect your PC up to your home stereo system using the LINE OUT jack on your PC sound card, and then all that fantastic digital quality sound can blast full volume on your home stereo system! As an alternative option, you can simply purchase high quality PC speakers these days that rival the home stereo system! A reasonably good set of PC speakers can rumble the walls enough for most people!

Imagine having all this flexibility just a click of a mouse away, with all your songs cataloged into your new online Digital Music Library!

Tuesday, November 14, 2006

Online Music Services

Subscription Music Sites offer online music purchase as well as the ability to access and play "millions" of songs. These sites require subscription (at a reasonable cost), and for the most part you must be online in order to access the subscription music. However, if you purchase songs they are usually downloaded to your PC and then can be played whenever you want. Keep in mind, that THESE resources are open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and they are NEVER out-of-stock!!

Rhapsodygives subscribers unlimited access to listen to more than 100,000+ albums, 70,000+ artists and 2,000,000+ songs and I like their user interface. It is very user-friendly and easy to navigate. Rhapsody offers an unlimited version at about $10 per month, and also a To Go option at about $15 per month. If you are a subscriber, they also give a 10% discount on music purchases. You can also check out their RealOne SuperPass Free Trial in which subscribers get to watch/listen to news, sports, film, TV and entertainment content using RealPlayer Plus. SuperPass also offers 3,200 radio stations and 10 free song downloads / month.

Yahoo! Music Unlimited offers their online music service for about $6 per month (with a yearly subscription), and they advertise over 2,000,000 songs. This is the most inexpensive subscription music service site I could find! If you want to use their service for loading songs onto your portable music player, then you will need the To Go option at about $10 per month (with yearly subscription). Still, you have to admit, these are some incredibly reasonable prices for a legal music service!

iTunes has arguably the largest and most popular service, possibly because of it's close relationship with iPod. Also, the software is fully compatible with both the Microsoft Windows and MAC operating systems! iTunes advertises as "the world’s best digital jukebox with the #1 music download store inside". As well as "Seamless integration with iPod". They offer the "Largest and Most Diverse Legal Music Download Catalog: Over 1 million tracks from all 5 major labels and more than 600 independents", as well as "More than 8,000 audiobooks and popular public radio programs". And don't forget, the jukebox software is FREE!!

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