Digital Entertainment. Digital Music

Digital Entertainment Digital Music © 2003 by TiVo Inc. Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission is prohibited. All rights reserv...
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Digital Entertainment Digital Music

© 2003 by TiVo Inc. Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission is prohibited. All rights reserved. Printed in the USA. TiVo, TiVo Central, and TiVolution are registered trademarks of TiVo Inc. The TiVo logo; TiVo, TV Your Way, Home Media Option, Season Pass; and WishList are trademarks of TiVo Inc., 2160 Gold Street, P.O. Box 2160, Alviso, CA 95002-2160. All other trademarks are the properties of their respective owners.

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Digital Music 13

Introduction

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What Is Digital Music?

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Benefits of Digital Music

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Getting Started with Digital Music

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Digital Music and TiVo

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Where to Find More Information

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Digital Music

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2 Introduction Since the advent of digital music over 20 years ago, the technology to record and play back sound digitally has become better and cheaper. You can now use your home computer to create CDs that you can play back in any CD player, or digital music files that you can play almost anywhere: • on your TiVo Series2 DVR • on a pocket-sized MP3 player • on your computer • on an MP3-capable CD player This document explains some of the benefits of digital music, and gives you some information to get you started. After reading this document, you will know the basics of digital music, including: • encoding MP3 files • playing MP3 files • copyright issues If you know how to use a computer, but you are not an expert on digital music, then read on!

What Is Digital Music? If you listen to music on Compact Discs (CDs) then you probably already know a little about digital music. Digital recording technology uses numbers to store sound waves. Unlike analog recordings (such as LP record albums and cassette tapes), digital recordings maintain their quality and fidelity no matter how many times they are played or copied. The process of converting sound to numbers is called digital sampling. The fidelity of a digital recording is directly related to the sample rate, or how many numbers are used per second to represent the original sound. An audio CD uses 44,100 32-bit samples per second. This sampling rate results in very large digital files. Each second of music on a CD takes about 172 K (kilobytes) of space on disk. A number of file formats have been developed for storing digital music. Some of these file formats compress the music into a smaller file, allowing more music to be stored in the same space on disk. One of the most popular file formats is MP3, which uses very effective compression to retain much of the sound quality of the original recording while reducing the file size by as much as ten times.

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Digital Music

As hard drive capacity grows, people have begun using their home computers to store digital music. Software that lets users catalog, store, play, and even trade digital music files has become increasingly popular. Pocket-sized hardware devices that store and play digital music are dropping in price.

Benefits of Digital Music Digital technology is changing the way people listen to music. Here are just a few things that the latest digital music technology lets you do: • take your music anywhere • organize your music library • play music all day without changing CDs or tapes • listen to free Internet radio • hear new music that is not yet available on CD • create custom CDs of your favorite music When all your music is stored as digital files on a hard drive, you are no longer bound to the physical medium of compact disks. A digital music player the size of a deck of playing cards can hold as many songs as 300 CDs. This means you no longer need to sort through stacks of CDs to find the music you want to hear. You can organize a library of music files into collections called playlists. Each playlist can represent a single album, or a collection of songs that you choose. A single song can appear in more than one playlist, giving you many ways to organize the same library of music. A playlist can contain any number of songs. If you choose, you can create a playlist containing all the songs in your music library. Most music players let you hear a playlist in sequence, or “shuffle” the songs and play them in a random order. If you have a connection to the Internet, you can listen to digital radio stations that “broadcast” over the web. These stations offer all genres of music, as well as talk radio, comedy, sports, and other content. If your computer has a CD writer, you can store digital music files on CD. A data CD full of compressed digital music files holds five to ten times as much music as a normal audio CD. You can also burn a standard audio CD, to play in your car.

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2 Getting Started with Digital Music Digital music is available in a variety of file formats. There is software available on the Web to convert among the various formats, or to convert music on an audio CD into digital music files in any format. Here are some of the most common formats: • MP3 • WMA • WAV The most popular format by far is the MP3 file. Most digital music software works with MP3 files, and the MP3 format offers relatively good compression without much loss in sound quality. The next section contains more information about MP3 files.

Creating MP3 Files To make a song from a CD available to your digital music player, you must “rip” the song, or extract the audio information from the CD and store it on your computer. The next step is to encode the ripped music into a file format such as MP3. Some software lets you rip and encode a song from a CD in one step. A few popular titles are: • MusicMatch Jukebox • CDEX • MP3 Wizard Music encoding software usually lets you select the way you encode your music. The sound quality is determined by the amount of compression you use in your MP3 files.

Compression Most MP3 encoders allow you to select the bit rate, or number of bits used per second to encode your songs as MP3 files. A higher bit rate gives better audio fidelity, but uses more space on disk. If you select a lower bit rate, you can store more music in the same space, but the sound quality is lower. How a given song sounds at a particular bit rate depends on the complexity of the music. Some music may sound fine encoded at 92 kbps, while other songs require 256 kpbs or more to preserve their fidelity. Some MP3 encoders allow you to encode songs using a variable bit rate. This means that the encoder adjusts the bit rate throughout the song, using a high bit rate to preserve as much fidelity as possible during complex passages, but using a lower bit rate to save space whenever possible.

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Players There are a few different ways to play MP3 files: • on your computer using inexpensive software, • on a pocket-sized MP3 player • on a TiVo Series2 DVR with Home Media Option • some CD players can play MP3 files stored on a CD The following paragraphs describe some of the software and hardware options available.

Software Players The number of MP3 players available online is growing constantly. Most of them allow you to organize your music into playlists, transfer music to a hardware MP3 player, burn custom CDs, and search for MP3 music online. A few of the most popular players are: • MusicMatch—a player that also works as an encoder • WinAmp—a player with a customizable look • Windows Media Player—a player that comes free with Windows • RealOne—a player that uses its own proprietary file format for music • iTunes—a player that comes free with Macintosh OS X MP3 players vary a great deal in the features that they offer. Which features you look for in the software depends on what is important to you when you listen to music. Here are some features you might consider when choosing an MP3 player: Internet radio. There are numerous free Internet “radio” stations that provide music and other content over the Web. Many MP3 players work with these stations; a few MP3 players link directly to these “broadcasters” and make it easy for you to find new music, comedy, news, sports, or other programming. CD burning. Some MP3 players let you use your computer’s CD-RW drive to create audio CDs, or data CDs full of MP3 files. You can play the audio CDs in most CD players. You can play data CDs containing MP3 files in any CD player that can read MP3 files. Customizable appearance. Some MP3 players let you customize their appearance. You can download different looks called “skins” to make the MP3 player suit your personality. Playlists. Most MP3 players offer a way to organize your MP3 files into playlists. You can put all the songs from one CD into a playlist, or you can mix and match songs from different CDs to create a party mix. Any given

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2 song can appear on more than one playlist, giving you many options for organizing your music. Encoding ability. Some players let you rip and encode music from audio CDs. Others let you convert from one file format to another. This is useful, for example, if you find music that is not in MP3 format and wish to play it on a hardware device that only works with MP3 files.

Hardware Players There are three types of hardware MP3 players: • memory-based MP3 players • MP3 CD players • disk-based players Memory-based MP3 players. Memory-based players contain random access memory (RAM) that they use to store music. Some players have built-in RAM, while others use removable memory cards. These players generally have enough storage for one or two CDs worth of music, and are relatively inexpensive. MP3 CD players. Some CD players can read data CDs containing MP3 files as well as regular audio CDs. You can store about five to ten audio CDs as MP3 files on a single data CD. Disk-based MP3 players. Small, high-capacity hard disks have led to pocketsized MP3 players that can store hundreds of CDs worth of music. These devices are two to three times the cost of memory-based players, but hold far more music.

Digital Music and TiVo Digital technology has made it easy and convenient to store hundreds of songs in your personal computer. To find a song, you no longer need to sort through stacks of CDs. Chances are, you don’t have your best speakers sitting next to your computer. If your home entertainment system includes a TiVo DVR Series2 with Home Media Option, then you can listen to MP3 songs stored on your PC using the high quality speakers in your living room instead of your computer speakers. Home Media Option streams the MP3 files directly from the computer, so they don’t take up any space on the DVR’s hard disk. Using the TiVo remote to browse and play songs in your music collection is easy.

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Where to Find More Information The following web sites provide information that will help you get started with digital music. http://www.tivo.com/media The website for Home Media Option. http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/mp3.htm A thorough explanation of how MP3 files work. http://www.mp3.com/ A large collection of independent music in MP3 format. http://www.musicmatch.com/ Information about the MusicMatch Jukebox MP3 player and Internet radio. http://www.realone.com/ Information about the RealOne MP3 player. http://www.winamp.com/ Information about the Winamp MP3 player.

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