PC PRIMER # 659
By Kristi Creighton Hicks
Copyright 2005
I have become an MP3 junkie!
How many of you have purchased a CD you couldn’t wait to listen to because you
liked a song on it only to get it home and find that you really only like “That
one song”? I have 250-300 CD’s and I am pretty sure that there are more
than a few that fit in this category!
Wouldn’t it be nice if there
were a way to keep track of the songs you wanted to listen to or a way to
create play lists that would let you listen to whatever you are in the mood for
at a given moment? There are many options out there that let you do
pretty much the same thing; You can rip CD’s to your computer or just the songs
you want to listen to(ripping a CD means to copy the songs or tracks from a
disc into the mp3 format and storing
them on your hard drive or external storage device).
You can listen to internet
radio, create play lists (groups of songs that you want to play together or
burn onto CD’s), and download music to your computer. My favorite of all of the software products
that I have tried is “Musicmatch
Jukebox 10.0”. Available at www.musicmatch.com this is a free
download with the capability to upgrade to premium service for a small monthly
fee. Many new computers come with the product pre-loaded and some even
offer a free month or two to try out the premium services. All you need is a
computer with a working CD-Rom drive and some time to invest in transferring
your music. I guarantee you will be hooked.
I personally prefer “Musicmatch Jukebox 10.0” to many
of the others because it is very easy to understand, and it has plug-ins that
work with a wide variety of MP3 players. We will cover the benefits of
MP3 players in another column in more detail but the ability to choose from
multiple players is nice to have.
I use Musicmatch primarily to
catalog and organize the music I already own. I have ripped almost all of
my personal CD’s to my computer (this can take up a LOT of hard drive space so
make sure you have the room, if you have a lot of CD’s or music files on your
computer you might consider an external hard drive to store your music. This
will keep your computer running a little faster.) I then use Musicmatch
Jukebox to listen to my music by genre or artist. The sorting capabilities
are terrific, allowing you to sort by track length, artist, title, album or
genre. Say you want to listen to Country, you can set it to play only
country songs randomly from all of your country CD’s. It’s like having
your own personal radio station where you control the playlist and there are
never any commercials!
Another way of using this program is to
download (legally) songs from the internet. Musicmatch has a catalog of
thousands of artists and albums which you can purchase at the click of a mouse
for $.99 a track or $9.99 for a whole album. They don’t have all of the albums
for every artist but they add new ones all the time. This is not file sharing,
this is purchasing the songs just like going to the store and buying the CD
only you don’t have to have all of the songs you don’t like! You can
search for artists and see all of the albums they have put out along with
biographies. “Musicmatch Jukebox
10.0”will also point you in the direction of related artists that
might interest you!
If you are looking for a way
to gain some control over the growing pile of music CD’s you own, Musicmatch
Jukebox 9.0 is a great place to start.
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