Extract from Relativity 2: 5th April, 1997
Mp3's by NickHeXuM

∞ R E L A T I V I T Y  E M A G ∞

Ok, well, first of all, if you are reading this article, you either know what
mp3's are, and your curiousor, you don't have a clue on earth what an MP3 is...

Well, if you dont know what an MP3 is, well i'll tell you...

MP3 stands for Mpeg-Layer3, the latest audio Mpeg format, an MP3 with a bitrate
of 128k can achieve a compression ratio of 12:1, so if you were to have a 50 meg
stereo wave file, in MP3, it would be ~4 megs, and the MP3 sounds will sound
almost identical to the .wav file.

One downside, decoding the MP3 in real time requires a bit of CPU power, if you
have anything less than a Pentium then you have to decrease the MP3 frequency,
and of course the MP3 wont sound as good when your playing it back.

Ok, so you want to make your own MP3?

Making an MP3:

Ok, 2 steps for making an MP3...

#1. You gotta rip the thing. I will advise the program "CDDA", because it's
probably the most popular and its easy to use, this will make an exact
digital copy of the song off the CD. But, not all cd's can rip DA frames.
This will take roughly 5-30 minutes depending on your CD drive.

#2. Encoding.... i think about the only program for this is L3ENC which stands
for Layer 3 Encoder. This will take roughly... 10-60 minutes, depending on
your CPU, and if your encoding in a very high format or not.

Playing MP3's...

The first application to play MP3's was WinPlay3, but recently, a whole new
array of MP3 players have popped up, including museArc and MAplay, but still,
WinPlay3 is the player that uses the least CPU power, so its the best option for
most.

There are also a couple of MP3 playlist makers, check out ShufflePlay, a very
good playlist maker.

While your on irc, check out #mpeg3 and #mpfiles, and take a look at the XDCC
offer bots they have there.

All programs mentioned can be downloaded from http://blue.res.wpi.edu/mp3.html