Sunday, January 24, 1999 - MP3 vs. MiniDisc

I ignored this MP3 stuff for a few months, even though everyone around me was listening to MP3 encoded files all day long while they coded.

Like many nerdy people, I used to make 'Favorites' cassette tapes from records. These tapes were 'okay', but then I started making them from CDs, and those tapes sound great!

This is why, of course, cassette tapes refuse to die - they are good enough most of the time.

When Sony introduced the Mini-Disc (MD), I thought that for sure we finally would have a replacement for cassettes. For one thing, there was a digital version that would give you 100 megs of storage for your PC.

Sony failed to execute, though, probably due to licensing greed (remember Beta?), and MD never really caught on. They're promoting it like mad now, but it still won't catch on, because MP3 is better, since you can share files over the Internet and on ZIP disks.

So, I bought a program called Music Match JukeBox that can rip disks into MP3 or .wav format, and also convert .wav into MP3 and vice versa. It's got a lame user interface but it performs really well encoding-wise.

Now I'm hooked on the MP3 format. Since ZIP disks emerged (much later than Sony MD disks) and became a standard interchange format for 100 or 200 megs of data, it's easy to rip a disk (the entire thing in one whack!) and then copy it onto a ZIP disk and then listen to it anywhere a Pentium class PC is handy.

I've been able to burn CD audio disks for at least three years, but I never could get around to it.

It just wasn't convenient to collect the data together to burn the disk.

But with Music Match, I just push a couple of buttons and my music gets ripped into .wav format, which I write onto CD.

So I started a project to burn six hours of my favorite music onto CD. Six CDs just happens to be the size of the CD changer in my car.

So far I've gotten three hours of my project done and I have to admit it's pretty cool!

Plus, I can convert my collection of favorites to MP3 and listen to them just about anywhere.

I'm looking forward to an improved version of the RIO player that can play more than 30 minutes of 128kbit MP3 sound (six hours would be good).

All these just goes to show that in consumer products, convenience is king. For example, since I'm almost forty, I actually own some LP records.

But it's just not convenient to record LPs into digital format (at least not for me - maybe if I had a couple of DAT players it would be cool) so I've never gotten around to capturing my records.

There is a cool hack I know, which is to use Hi-Fi video cassettes to record audio. Since I have a VCR near my one remaining record player, and a VCR that I can record digitally from, maybe I'll copy my favorites onto VHS video tape and then encode them.

Since I never managed to get up the gumption to buy a DAT I've used the VHS Hi-Fi hack to move audio around at near-DAT quality. (Try it - VHS Hi-Fi is really high quality, at least in the consumer space. It's also plenty good for games. And most people have access to a Hi-Fi VCR and very few people have access to a DAT machine.)

But it's clearly not as convenient as just popping a CD into a PC and ripping the tracks right onto my hard drive.

Once I have all six hours encoded at 44K on six CDs, I will also have all six hours also encoded in MP3. The entire collection of six hours of stuff, encoded in MP3, will fit easily on a single CD, so I can take my favorites with me wherever I go.

The Windows Media Player includes an MP3 codec, and will also play .m3u files, which are simple lists of sounds files (they can be any media format, not just MP3).

(I highly recommend downloading the Windows Media Player - it plays just about everything. It's currently available at this location.)