I want to make a mix cd for one of my friends… but she lives quite a distance away. My default idea has been to just send the songs as attachments to email, but does anyone have any better ideas?
You could send the files via AIM. Just have her log in, you log in, set up to send an entire folder of files, and you both can go do whatever while they transfer. Or you could set up a desktop FTP site on your computer, give her a log-in, and let her download them directly off of your computer.
You could also zip the songs up as one big file (up to 1GB) and use YouSendIt!. This service is free, and gets around the usual 10MB or so e-mail attachment size limit, thus reducing overhead. You can also e-mail the resulting URL to other friends. The file will be deleted from YouSendIt’s server after 7 days.
Put them on your personal web page. That’s the only thing I use my web page for, it gets around the size limitations for email. After the other person lets you know that they’ve downloaded them, you can take them off the web site.
I’ll throw in a vote for FTP, since this is the kind of job it was designed for, especially if your friend will be downloading over a dial-up type connection. Were you going to compress the files?
Actually, the real geeky solution would be to make an ISO image of the CD, then send that as a single file, thus ensuring that the CD your friend gets is an exact copy of the one you would have made at home, with all tracks in the correct order, right length of gaps between songs, etc. But that’s probably major overkill in this case.
Thanks, I’ll experiment with some of these methods, since I’ve never heard of any of them except IM.
But what’s FTP?
FTP = File Transfer Protocol, a protocol for transferring files. It’s often used to transfer files to webservers. It’s whole purpose is to allow computers to exchange files. FTP can be set up so that access is passworded or to allow anyone who knows about it to log into it.