Sharing Music

Some friends and I have come up with a nice, simple way to dramatically boost our mp3 collections by systematically sharing our entire collections with each other in a secure, non peer-to-peer environment. Three of us each have nearly 15 gigs of music that we are going to put up. That is somewhere between 2,500 and 4,000 songs per person. Sure there's probably a good amount of music that is duplicated among our collections, but I think we will probably find less overlap than you might initially imagine for three friends with fairly similar interests in music.

We would very much like to share our collections with some of you if you would be willing to reciprocate. In order to join in the sharing, I would ask that you have at least (or about) 1,000 mp3's to share with us. I think that arbitrary number will help make it worth everyone's time and effort. The actual sharing will probably not take place until mid-December or perhaps even after the new year, so there is plenty of time for you to organize your collection and join us.

I have been using MP3nity to update the ID3v1 and ID3v2 tags as well as the file names of my music collection. Since I just found out that it rips music from CD's while automatically naming the files and filling in the tags, I have been using it to make digital back-ups of my actual CD's. This is allowing me to quickly boost my digital music collection, and I am certain that my friends will appreciate my efforts. MP3nity is available for download at CNET's download.com. It's free to try for 10 days, and then it costs $15. It's worth it. It's a good program that works very well and uses the cddb database to make auto-tagging your files and systematically renaming them quick and easy. (I name everything as <artist> - <album> - <track> - <title>. I hope that you'll use the same method, but if you don't, then I still be able to anally update my collection using MP3nity.) My only complaints are that the Help Documentation that you use to learn how to use the program is not written particularly well. The program also runs a little slowly at times although I am almost certain that that is because I am sometimes asking it to look at folders that have 1,500 files in them. Overall, I like it and recommend it if you consider yourself generally computer competent.

If you don't want to pay the fifteen bucks, I also like the Quintessential Media Player. Quintessential is free, it plays all media files, and it rips CD's at any bit rate you desire. This is good because most free players like Real Player, Winamp, and Windows Media Player will either not allow you to rip files or will only allow ripping at 96 kb without paying for the upgrade. Quintessential lets you rip at 128, 160, 192, or 256 kb. 128 is the minimum you should consider. 256 probably produces file sizes that are too big compared to the additional quality gains. I've been using 160 because it seems like an ideal compromise between file size and quality.

Right now we're looking at only the three of us participating in this little experiment, but there's no reason we couldn't do it with thrity people. If you are interested or have further questions, please shoot me an email and I'll get you into the loop. The more who play, the more songs we'll all have to play. It doesn't matter where you live or what type of music is predominant in your collection. You'll find plenty of punk rock from us, but there will be plenty of other genres including good representations of surf, rap, electronic, 60's, metal, hard rock, comedy, girl bands, and more.

Jonathan 10/31/2004 09:25:00 PM