The Labs.Com Sound Lab MP3 Lab

The Labs - Design & Functionality For The Net

Motion Picture Expert Group, Audio Layer 3 - MP3

1. Introduction
2. Players
3. Encoders
4. How To ..
5. MP3 Search Engines

MP3 (MPEG Audio Layer 3) is the format to store high-quality music, with the ratio of 10/1 compression of oridinary CD-MUSIC vs MP3-file, or in other words 1MB/min, or 16KB/s or 128kb/s.

The format also allows to encode in 32kb/s, 64kb/s, or even 256kb/s, so far 128kb/s seems most appropiate encoding rate with best ratio quality/file-size.

MP3 Lab 2. Players

XMMS Number one	FreeAmp Another good looking player	XAudio MP3 developer package
MP3.Com No 1 site for MP3 stuff, check it!	MPG123 MPEG-1/2 Player (Layer 1,2,3) without front-end

MP3 Lab 3. Encoders

It's hard to find encoders since patent-holders usually make people close their sites:

LAME Encoder GPL encoder	BladeEncoder Free MP3 encoder	MPEG Encoder Another free encoder (seems gone as well)
8Hz MP3enc Alternative download since 8Hz.Com removed it.

MP3 Lab 4. How To ..

Recording Analog Audio

Many of us have collection of good old tapes, or (maxi-) singles or long-play albums: Setup best possible recording equipment. Record 16bit @ 44.1kHz, stereo. Keep title of songs, and artists for search-engine. Choose whether you like to burn Music CD (raw, aprx. 75 mins), or MP3 Data CD (aprx. 750 mins, or 10hrs) We use here at The-Labs use our RawSoundStudio to record and handle the recording (the source-code isn't released yet). There is wavrec and wavplay available, look at wavplay-1.0.tar.gz.

Compressing Audio CDs

To compress ordinary music CD to MP3 consider this: Compression is 1:10, means, 10 audio-CDs may fit on one MP3 CD Choose ISO-9660 with Joliot extension, so also Windowz boxes can play it. Store titles (maybe use CDDB.Com) and artist info, you like to have a search engine done for your archive. First quality recordings you may encode with higher rate then 128kb/s (1MB/min), but 256kb/s, this doubles the usual file-size, but hold more details. If you are paranoia, you may NOT compress it with MP3, but store it in 16bit/44.1kHz raw format. CDParanoia Rips audio-tracks in WAV or raw 16bit format Freshmeat.Net: MP3 Search for MP3 to find combined tools which rip audio-tracks and store MP3 direct CPAN: MP3 Perl Modules for MP3 (rippers, players, ID3tag read/set etc) Quick and straight-forward solution under csh (or tcsh) using MPEG Encoder & CD Paranoia:  cdparanoia -r -B 1-   foreach i (*.raw)       encode -l 3 -m d -p 2 -b 112 $i $i:r.mp3   end  or you use the /usr/ports/audio/cd2mp3 port under FreeBSD which does it for you.

DAT to MP3

If you have experience or recommendation, let us know and we include it here.

Burning MP3 CDs

Check our CDROM-section which contains more infos on filesystem and ISO9660 extension and how to burn Data-CDs. ID3 Tag MP3 extension to store title, author, copyright We are about to record over 200hrs singles and maxi-singles of our private archive til Summer 1999, and probably trash the vinil completely (takes up just too much space anyway). We expect to put 200hrs music on 20CDs.

Burning Music-CDs

Some people like to burn their MP3's back to Music-CD, quick and straight-forward solution:  mpg123 -s mysong.mp3 > mysong.raw   mpg123 -s mysong2.mp3 > mysong2.raw   ...   cdrecord -v dev=2,0 speed=4 -pad -swab -audio *.raw  Obmit -swab in case you are not on intel-based system. Remember there is only 650MB Audio available, aprx. 74 min music.

MP3 Lab 5. MP3 Search Engines

OpenDirectory: MP3 Search-Engines Search MP3 files

                                                                                                                                   

Sound Lab

Raw Sound Studio