Music is a prevailing form of entertainment for many forms of life. Birds use it to attract mates, musicians use it to get fame, and ordinary humans have recently discovered a surprisingly effective way to store (and distribute) music using the Internet. We are in the beginning of the digital music revolution.

In the year 1887, Thomas Edison was credited for designing a simple phonograph. This was the first device that could capture and re-create music without the help of a human musician (before the invention of the phonograph, musicians used printed sheets of music to re-create the artists ideas musically). Soon, the wax cylinder (that originally held the sound on a phonograph) was replaced with flat discs called records, lp's, 45's, and a host of other odd names that only your parents and grandparents remember or care about. After records lost their culture shock, and a better technology was found yet again, music started being stored on tapes. First, the tapes were in the form of large 8 tracks, and then on smaller tapes called audiotapes, which you can still buy today. The ways of storing music continually change, but an entirely new and exciting revolution is evolving in music. Digital music, and the Internet working together, causes this evolution.

Well, we still commonly hold music on flat discs (called cd's), but they are much smaller than records were, and they are much better at storing music. With the Internet, and computers in general, music has gone digital. Humans have figured out how to turn music into binary code, which means that music can be converted into a series of 1's and 0's that computers can understand. Once music is represented in this way, it can be handled as a computer file. Possibly the most fascinating aspect of music being digital is that it can be sent at the speed of light to anywhere in the world via the Internet.

While this is a very exciting idea for the consumer of music, it is also a pretty scary idea for the current music stars and music companies of today. Big music companies fear that their merchandise will be stolen and shared so vigorously that the Internet will destroy their moneymaking schemes that they have worked so hard on. While digital music may very well damage the music stars of today, I think it will probably help music as a whole. When the phonograph came along musicians of the past thought it would hurt their sales, and it didn't. In fact it greatly increased music sales and popularity. Already, digital music and the Internet have helped upcoming stars gain popularity and success in the new global market of Internet music.

For the better part of my life, I have been pretty disinterested in music of almost all kinds. If someone asked me what kind of music I liked back then I would have to say "Nintendo music" for that was about all the music I listened to. Recently though, I have dropped my main form of entertainment (video games). I suppose my recent interest in music has been my way of filling the void that video games left. Recently I have experimented in some of the most interesting areas that digital music has to offer. My favorite thing to do with digital music is to copy it without much effort.

Recently my family got a new computer with a cd burner. Music software was included :). It came with the programs Real Player, Music Match, and Roxio Easy Cd Creator 5. I figured that since I had the most excellent of means, I should try my hand at some digital music creating and copying.

The first (and still the only) website I have downloaded music from is mp3.com. Mp3.com has a great learning/help section that teaches you all about mp3's and how to download them from their web site. Everything that is downloadable off of mp3.com is perfectly legal (and free of charge). The musicians actually want you to download their songs so that they can become popular enough to go mainstream. Although you probably won't find many bands on mp3.com that you have ever heard of (or that are any good), they do have some very good artists that are worth your listening time.

Downloading one 3 minute song takes me about 20 minutes. People with DSL connections, or other faster connections, will find that they can download music much faster than I can. I have to admit it is a bit painful to watch your computer "do nothing" for the 20 minutes or so most people currently have to wait to get an mp3-compressed song. Still, this is much faster than the hours it would take to download a wav file. A wav file is what your cd player plays from a typical cd. Mp3's are a fairly efficient algorithm. This means that it compresses the 1's and 0's of music files in a way that doesn't change the music much at all but makes the file smaller. Mp3's are about one tenth the size of a similar wav file, and they take about one-tenth the time to download from the Internet. Still though, the 20 minutes waiting for one song to finish downloading onto your computer may be enough to convince many people to buy a cd instead of get it for free from the internet.

I had a slightly difficult time figuring out how I could rip (copy to my computer) and burn (copy onto a cd) music, but I soon figured it out. It is slightly harder to make cd's yourself than to buy one, but it costs much less money to make one yourself. I figure that if you have trouble running a vcr then creating digital music may just not be for you. If you can run a vcr (and your computer) though (even my grandma can) then you definitely have what it takes to create a cd that will have only the songs you like best on it. Digital music and a cd burner gives you total control over what kind of a cd you want to create. Just imagine; any kind of music, from any number of artists, in any order. You can almost hear your digital music telling you, "Special orders don't upset us."

With my growing collection of cd's and my new interest in creating music, I soon decided that I needed a way in which to play them that wouldn't result in the computer having to be turned on or the family stereo driving my mom into a frenzy. I decided I would get a personal cd player to solve these music woes.

I have been very impressed with the resultant cd player I bought. I now have a Phillips brand, digital tuner, cd player combo. It has a 45 second anti-skipping device. It lasts about 20 hours on two AA batteries. I have never changed the batteries yet. I think the radio on it is great. It is way better than our car's radio/tape player. My only complaint about the cd player is that it makes a strange mosquito-like sound when it is not in use, but this is easily overlooked.

I have found a very fun way to play with digital music. After buying a simple line in to line out jack from radio shack, I was able to connect my computer to almost any radio, cd player, tape player, or just about anything with a headphone or line out 1/8 of an inch plug. What this means is that I can take music from an audiotape, or even from the radio, and convert it to digital mp3's. I usually use Music Match Jukebox to record my mp3's from the line in plug on my computer. Once in digital mp3 form, I can use my cd burner to essentially make a cd from the line in plug. I have tried this a couple of times and it works very well. You can also capture any sound at all using a microphone, but I have found the quality will sound very poor after listening to any run of the mill mp3 song, but I bet Edison would think it rocked!

The future of music is quickly evolving and advancing just like most everything else nowadays. I have found that digital music is a very fun area of computers to explore, but whether it will help or hurt large music companies remains to be seen. My theory is that whatever happens, large music companies, musicians, bands, and anyone else who likes listening to or creating music will be helped (not hurt) by this new ever-advancing technology- that is digital music.