Today I was searching ruthlessly for a midi file and came across MP3 even though I have experienced MP3 in the past.
Now I am a techchick but because of my internet connection, it sucks as cable is not available, DSL is to far from my home to make the dollars make sense ($99 a month for a 144k connection) and I have yet to get with the line of sight people (aka Sprint, I just don’t trust them – go figure.)
I have pretty much stayed away from the MP3 format because of this issue however I ended up downloading the latest of Microsoft’s Media Player (even if it is a system hog) and hit the main MP3.com site. This is where I have been for a good majority of my internet day.
I found a shit load of songs that are good, I think I downloaded 14 in all, which took forever especially during peak internet times, damn buffering.
But here I sit back and am enjoying the hell out of music I would never have heard on my local radio station and I don’t have to put up with commercials!
Thankfully I still have almost 15 gigs of space out of a 20 GIG HD. Oh and I have downloaded more!!!
BUT I will be taking out some dinero for the backups to ZIP disks as I will not be screwed over if a system crash happens when I have spent so much dial-up time downloading and discovering these files…nope not gonnna get screwed there.
I hear ya, Tech’ems m’dear. I got into the whole Mp3 thing about three years ago (three years ago?!?), back before Mr. and Mrs. Joe Average knew about it.
I had DL-ed the full soundtrack from Final Fantasy 3 (great video game, greater music)… the whole thing was over 600 MB, and it took me weeks upon weeks out of the summer to get them all. Well, I had them on the HD for about a year, and then they went and got deleted one day when my dad (genius that he is) went and removed my file from the computer. Lost everything… including a few poems, short stories, a couple hundred pages of writing… gah! It was horrible.
But I want to make an announcement to everybody… never, ever bother with portable Mp3 players. They are NOT WORTH IT. You pay two hundred bucks, for what? Two hours of music? Fuck that. Get yourself a minidisc player/recorder with an Mp3 extension. Sure, the player/recorder itself may cost around $250, but a single minidisc holds 76 minutes of music, and you can buy five of 'em for less than ten bucks. For a 64-meg CompactFlash card (that’s, what, a couple hours of Mp3’s?) you’ll have to shell out around $140. They’re rip-offs!!!
Sorry. Blatantly gratuitous announcement, I know… I just love my MD!!!
Good on ya hun but because of my shitty internet access I been have VERY reluctant to go there or anywhere that requires a wide pipeline to the 'net.
I am there despite the fact that I can’t do anything else while downloading files. Trust me on this, my connection says 26.4kps but my brain registers much less than that as does other places if I do a test. Last test I was at about 22kps!
So in that regard you should be able to appreciate my screwed up connection…two years ago I did have some standard connection rates at 49,3333 while in Denver. I miss those days but going to look forward to to a line-of-sight connection assuming I can snag the cash for the install, modem, etc…
If they want to touch my computer though, it’s out of the question…no one touches my 'puter but me. That is just not going to happen, it’s my baby, my life…No person touches my computer but me!
Hey now! Don’t talk about me behind my back! Actually, I didn’t do it. My hubby is the one with the 13 gig hard drive full of MP3’s. At last count, we had somewhere in the range of 3500-4000 MP3’s. However, he doesn’t really have any music that has come out in the last couple of years. On my own computer, I have maybe 75 MP3’s, mostly stuff that has come out this year (before you ask, yes I do happen to have Britney Spears and N’Sync on the list, please shoot me now)
<stands up> My name is Simetra, and I’m an Mp3-aholic.
<group> Hi Simetra.
<continuing> You name it. I’ve used it. Napster…Scour…FT. Oh… I’m so ashamed. <breaks down into tears>
Not really. I love my music, 'cause this way I don’t need CD’s. I can take them anywhere with my Mp3 player, and I get to listen to whatever I want. Oh… I love Napster.
Spoofe, I have to tell you that you don’t have the whole story on portable mp3 players. I got my 32M (upgradable) for $25. It’s a RaveMP, I got it from an online promotion. These deals pop up quite often, and you’d have to be a real chump to shell out $200 for one.
And Sony is just evil. Minidisks are proprietary (mp3s are too, technically, but that cat’s out of the bad. Switch to Ogg Vorbis when you get the chance). Sony is one of the biggest supporters of the SDMI initiative which is blatantly hostile to consumers and deeply infringes on your fair-use rights. I don’t know about an mp3 extension to minidisk players, but I know that sony’s “mp3 player” isn’t really that at all. It requires you to transform the mp3 to another format (Atrac-something or other), which is of course, only playable on Sony players.
TechChick, welcome to the wonderful world of music that doesn’t suck.
I didn’t really get into the whole thing until I got ADSL. Then… I couldn’t stop. I went from virgin to raging maniac in no time. I wanted to find groups I hadn’t heard of in ages. New Music that our “rock” stations don’t play. New music that I’d never heard of before.
Then I stopped. I have 1 Gig of stuff I like, and it’s been there for awhile. I might get back into the swing of things in awhile, but not now.
I love my portable MP3 player. I won it last year at my company’s Christmas party, and I use it quite a bit. There’s one thing that it does better than just about any other portable minidisc or CD player, and that’s that it takes a beating without any problem. On and off during the year, I run/jog for exercise, and the mp3 is the greatest thing on earth for music while running. I’ve yet to find a cd-jogger that really works, and with the mp3 I can make my own running mixes. I love the thing!
I gotta confess here. At one time, I had over 500 mp3s, and my husband had over 600. Then we had to re-format the hard drive. Guess who didn’t back her stuff up
Most of the stuff I collect is lesser-known one-hit-wonder stuff that’s hard to find unless I’m willing to shell out bux for a CD. And, I’m not.
I started downloading 6 days ago and have about 100 files already. This is in spite of the fact that 5 minutes of sound takes about an hour to download.
So, help me defeat some of my own ignorance. How can I find out what the ping rate of my computer is?
Do you have a burner? Burning mp3’s to CD-ROM to recover your space is the best way.
and I am in the same bandwidth starved type of area…too far out for DSL, no upstream with the local cable company…
ended up going Dual ISDN…it’s only $39.00 bucks a month…
First, you’ll need to open up a MS-DOS Prompt. Most likely a shortcut for that will be in your programs menu. If you don’t see one there however, you can just go into your windows directory (probably C:\Windows) and double click on the file command.com. Once you have the prompt open you’ll see something like:
Microsoft(R) Windows 98
(C)Copyright Microsoft Corp 1981-1998.
C:\WINDOWS>
At the prompt type in:
ping url
where ‘url’ is the site you wish to test your connection to.
After the command has finished running, it will spit out some results, including the average round trip time in milliseconds, which is probably the one that will interest you the most.
Note however, that while this is the speed your computer can communicate with that another computer at, it’s not the same thing as the amount of data which you can download at one time (which is what most of the people in this thread have been talking about). If you don’t know how your computer is connected to the internet, or do know but aren’t sure what the maximum amount you can download is on that connection, probably the easist way is to just download something fairly big (a file at least a few megabytes big) and see. It will depend on what program you’re using for the download, but just about any progam should tell you someplace what your rate of either kilobytes or kilobits is per second.
Okay so I have determined these three year old speakers have got to go…oh and about my sound card, must get a SoundBlaster Live card…Oh and get in contact with Sprint for their broadband wirless service.
MP3s are so yesterday. Scour exchange is the new toy. I got bored with simply stealing songs, there just wasn’t enough self-righteousness coming my way? Now we can download entire movies in MPEG4. And the coolest thing is that half of them are bootlegs, and aren’t available anywhere, which really should make some people feel superior.
I’ll just sit here and wait for the morallity patrol to comment.
Sorry if I’m hijacking, but I have so many questions about my new obsession. . .
I have a 56k modem (not the best connection, but it’s all I’ve got) and I see a transfer rate that varies anywhere from 8 k/s to a high point of 4.5 k/s.
So, I think to myself, I can theoretically get a transfer rate of 56 k/s. Stop me if I’m wrong.
O.K., now I’ve got a 56k modem but AOL connects at 28 (sometimes even lower), so the best rate of transfer I can get is 28 k/s?
Now I have to take into account the speed of the computer I’m downloading from, right? Is there some kind of equation that’ll help me figure all this out?
And still, why is my average rate of transfer only about 1.5 k/s?
Biggirl. The modem ‘speed’ is quote in kbps(kilobits per second). Downloads are usually quoted in kBps(kilobytes per second). A byte= 8 bits, so a 56 kbps connection is only 6 kBps, and a 28.8 kbps is 3.5 kBps max download. An average of 1.5 kBps isn’t all that bad with internet traffic these days.
