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So You want to make mp3s?
Nice one. Heres how I go about it: More and more people say to me 'how do you make mp3s Neil?'. I want more of them to be beautiful women on beaches in the south of France. More often people ply me with beer and ask me to make mp3s for them, 3 last month and while its lovely to be able to help them there are only so many hours in the day. You only have to see the size, mp3 wise of this site to see I've got my hands full! So this guide is for four EXCELLENT reasons.
1 - so that more people can make more mp3s and we can all put music out on the WWW demolish the music industry that uses physical media. It deserves to be crushed at tremendous speed. It's full of blinkered unimaginatives, total users and capitalist scum. How dare they charge you money for thier watered down crap! The music industry is a sick disgusting joke on all creative people and mp3 is a way to start to give it the quick death it deserves. FREE MUSIC NOW
2 - so that people who whinge at me about things like sound quality can realise that it's actually rather complicated and involved and either chill or f**k off.
3 - so that more positive people prepared to get on top of it can see that it doesnt require a masters in digital signal processing, not any more anyway, and can have a go themselves. It's quite satisfying if you like that sort of thing.
4 - to free up more time to do mp3s of all of the GREAT music that is waiting to go on the AFD records and film collective site! And there is some TERRIFIC stuff in the offing.
So here goes: Neils Quick guide to mp3:
1 - Get the kit:
Record the file with something like cooledit, which you can get for free on the WWW. Cooledit is the best as it lets you tweak things like volume. Any search engine will find you a fast download site for Cooledit. You need a PC with soundcard, and some sort of 32 bit microsoft OS like win 95. You need an mp3 encoder, the best I've found, and it took a lot of searching, is bladeenc. It has windowsy front ends now I think, but the command line version works fine. www.bladeenc.cjb.net used to work. Try that first. I dont have the current link right now but do a search on www.dogpile.com and it ought to pull it out no probs. If stuck, email me for the binary. Its only about 200k. In size that is, of course feel free to send me 200 grand for it if youve just won the lottery.
2 - Go into Cooledit:
start with 44.1khz sample rate. This will be good enough for sticking the sound file on CD at some point if you want to do that as well. I use mono, half the file size of stereo, and half the download time.
3 - Set the record level:
When you record the file, dont worry about start and finish, as you can trim off the quiet bits later. Also you can tidy up the whole sample with fade in/fade out if you need to. Set the volume level so the recording happens at no louder than about -6dB. This will be more than enough level as you'll not get tape hiss with digital recording. Never go into the red (0dB) as digital saturation is very nasty! Its not the smooth saturation you used to get on analogue tape, it's sharp clicks and bumps.
4 - Finish recording, get rid of all those cheesy analogue shortcomings.
Chances are you'll have a tape to mp3 at some point. These are the most fiddly, but its not insurmountable. You'll probably need to take out tape hiss. (optimistic probably, ho ho) Cooledit uses a nice FFT (Fast Fourier Transform) based noise removal algorithm that basically speaking, removes noise from the frequency content of the file. Muck about with it, dont use a lot of noise removal (or you'll start to lose things like cymbals) and you should get some good results with practice. Go for the biggest input sample range your processor can stand. An easier way is to use quick filter, which looks like a graphic equaliser and comes with cooledit, and turn down the treble a bit.
5 - Storage note:
Reckon on about 2.5 meg for every minute of recorded material. Do this as much as I do and you'll see that it soon adds up and fries your hard drive. Storing stuff on CD is OK, but it actually works out cheaper to buy a load of old SCSI drives and chain them together. If you're considering doing a load of sampling/recording and on a budget, get a SCSI card, some drives (go for solidly built stuff like IBM, Fujitsu, Compaq if you can) and a SCSI cable. 50pin SCSI stuff is most cost effective and perfectly fast enough for audio.
Then you need to save the file as a .wav. I always recommend using a fairly high sampling rate to start with, that way you'll get pretty good quality when the mp3 encoder dowsamples (you can always take information out, but you cant put it back in).
6 - Time to make mp3:
You go to the DOS prompt and call Bladeenc. Then you specify the sampling rate for the mp3, and the input file name. The syntax is:
bladenc -s file
where s is sampling rate for the mp3 file is the filename and extension of the sound file
Sampling rates I've used are 64kbit/s 56kbit/s, and 48kbit/s, but these are for MONO
Busy files with lots of noise will need a higher sampling rate, or the file will come out sounding as if it's underwater with a heavy phasing effect. Spaced out minimal stuff can get away with a lower sample rate. Try to experiment on a fast computer! My p166 struggles a bit and youre looking at 20 minutes to encode abut 5 minutes. Then you'll always need to listen to it and go through the whole process again from as far back as Cooledit if youre unlucky.
Say I have a file called late.wav.
Bladeenc on my machine lives in d:\bladeenc, and the file is in d:\album2\complete, so I start off in that directory. You can type in the full paths to bladeenc but I prefer it this way.
D:\album2\complete>d:\bladeenc\bladeenc -48 late.wav
Batch runs are a doddle, so you can do a big mp3 job when you go down the pub. Try:
>bladeenc -64 *.wav
7 - tell the world:
Then its time to FTP it. FTP is a subject in itself, but one thing to remember, what you now have is a binary file, so make sure whatever FTP package you have knows this. In traditional FTP type
ftp>binary
and it returns:
Type set to I, which means Image.
I dont know you from Adam but much respect if you've got this far, and I wish you the very very best of luck from the bottom of my heart in making your own mp3s. Have fun, and if you get stuck, ask me at nb@nme.com and I'll try to help.