By Scot Hacker
March 2000
Pages: 400
ISBN 10: 1-56592-661-7 |
ISBN 13: 9781565926615
(Average of 1 Customer Reviews)
This book is OUT OF PRINT, but is available on Safari Books Online.
DescriptionMP3: The Definitive Guide introduces the power-user to just about all aspects of MP3 technology. It delves into detail on obtaining, recording, and optimizing MP3 files using both commercial, and Open Source methods. Coverage is complete for four platforms: Windows, Macintosh, Linux and BeOS. In depth chapters describe all aspects of the MP3 experience from distributing, streaming, broadcasting, converting and playing to archiving your collection. Readers will learn how to test their equipment, optimize their encoding times, evaluate their playback options, control and organize a collection, even burn their own CD's or distribute their own music to a massive worldwide audience over the Internet. In addition, the author fills readers in on the complex legal issues surrounding MP3 files. Everything you need to know to enjoy MP3 today and tomorrow is contained in this single volume.
Full Description
MP3, standing for MPEG-1, Layer 3, is a codec for compressing the size of audio files for digital distribution. Much more than a definition, MP3 is nothing less than a cultural and economic revolution on the Internet. Every day, hundreds of thousands of MP3 music files are searched for, shared, recorded and listened to by computer and Internet users of all kinds. Either alone or collected into massive download sites, the MP3 revolution is seriously threatening the traditional ways people find, listen to and create music. MP3 players and encoders are available for all major computer platforms, including Windows, Macintosh, Linux and BeOS. MP3 hardware players include portable players you can take with you jogging or exercising from manufactures like Sony, Diamond and Philips to home stereo and car stereo players.
MP3: The Definitive Guide introduces the power-user to just about all aspects of MP3 technology. It delves into detail on obtaining, recording, and optimizing MP3 files using both commercial, and Open Source methods. Coverage is complete for four platforms: Windows, Macintosh, Linux and BeOS. In depth chapters describe all aspects of the MP3 experience from distributing, streaming, broadcasting, converting and playing to archiving your collection. Readers will learn how to test their equipment, optimize their encoding times, evaluate their playback options, control and organize a collection, even burn their own CD's or distribute their own music to a massive worldwide audience over the Internet. In addition, the author fills readers in on the complex legal issues surrounding MP3 files. Everything you need to know to enjoy MP3 today and tomorrow is contained in this single volume.
MP3 is here to stay, and the applications for this versatile compression format are expanding exponentially along with its user base. MP3: The Definitive Guide should appeal to a broad audience of users, from the those just getting into this exciting new technology, to those who want to fully immerse themselves in the complexities and possibilities that MP3 presents.
Featured customer reviews
MP3: The Definitive Guide Review, December 25 2000
Rating:
Submitted by Charles
[Respond | View]
Scot Hacker's MP3: The Definitive Guide is SWEET! I was very pleasently surprised to see extensive Linux coverage, as well as BeOS, MacIntosh and Windows. Although I would have liked to have seen more coverage in the tag section, particularly with respect to Linux, MP3: The Definitive Guide is *THE* most comprehensive book of its kind. Hacker makes difficult concepts easy, and covers important concepts. (I was particularly pleased with the sections on ripping and encoding, plus the homebrew section). Great job Scot, thank you!
MP3: The Definitive Guide Review, March 15 2000
Submitted by Michael Joly [Respond | View]
Scott Hacker says "Most of the music we hear is handed to us by the recording industry, and that industry treats music exclusively as a business. But amazing people making amazing music are all around us."
"I may be a hopeless idealist, but I believe that great music will bubble to the top on its own merits."
I agree, but I think great music still needs some help in the bubbling up process.
The MP3 artist/listener community needs an “interactive MP3 music recommendation” service to help listeners find music they would like.
I say interactive, because users should be able to seed a music recommendation engine with the names of independent artists they they like. The engine would return music suggestions for listeners to audition and rate.
Successive iterations through the recommendation engine would help it learn, and make better suggestions about what a listener would like to hear.
Users could adopt different “personas” at different times – they could have an “alternative” persona, an “ambient” persona or an “electronica” persona. This respects the idea that music listeners have broad tastes and often have multiple genres of music in their collections. The interactive MP3 music recommendation engine would keep track of each of the user’s personas and build a library of suggested tracks for the user to rate.
By correlating the preferences of many different(anonymous) personas, the recommendation engine would draw on the filtering intelligence of the community to offer a personalized user experience.
For example, my ambient persona “SoundmanMJ” might like stuff like Global Communication, Autechre, and the 2nd Orbital disc but not like stuff by FSOL. I’d like an MP3 interactive music recommendation engine to look for other ambient personas in the database and make music suggestions based on a good persona match.
I guess this idea is somewhat similar to Amazon’s “purchase circles” combined with user recommendation ratings plus their “people who bought X also bought Y” service.
I’d like to see a user driven service where the more I used it, the more valuable it would become to me.
What do you all think?
Michael Joly
http://artists.mp3s.com/artists/40/michael_joly.html
Media reviews "Best MP3 book" -- Third Annual BookBytes Awards, Dec 2000
"The breadth of coverage is impressive...anyone seeking high-quality MP3 audio will be well-served by Hacker's work." --Stephen Withers, Australian Personal Computer, Oct 2000
"informative, educational and relatively easy to read--should be placed on the list of essential reading for its category. Highly recommendable." --Jerry Suppan, Tokyo PC Users Group. July 2000
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