FINDING THE BEST AUDIO FILES

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For most novices, the fastest way to find and download music is to join one of the many file sharing networks. Unfortunately, the quality of music on the various file sharing networks can range from excellent to downright dreadful, and it’s often impossible to know the audio quality of a file until it has been downloaded. Some file sharing programs, such as LimeWire, grade the quality of a file with zero to four stars, as shown in Figure 9-8. With such a rating system to guide you, it’s generally best to download only files with four-star ratings.

Figure 9-8: LimeWire rates the quality of a file from zero to four stars so you can determine the quality of a file before downloading it.

Many novices convert songs from an audio CD to an MP3 file without really understanding technical details like bit rate. The bit rate determines the audio quality of a song by defining how much audio data gets sent from the storage medium (such as an MP3 file) to your decoder (which is a program that translates the audio file into actual sound) per second. The higher the bit rate, the higher the audio quality of the file and the larger the file. The most common bit rate for MP3 files is 128, although 192, 256, and 320 bit rates are used to increase audio fidelity. Because many novices use a low bit rate, many songs on the file-sharing networks are of dubious quality. Once someone grabs a copy of a poorly recorded song and makes it available for sharing, more people are likely to download and spread that same copy, contaminating the entire file sharing network with mediocre recordings.

One final challenge comes from the recording industry itself, which hires companies to pollute a file sharing network with bogus music files of poor quality. Such companies flood a file sharing network seven days a week, 24 hours a day. While people often identify and delete such bogus files, they still appear often enough to annoy users.

Newsgroups tend to offer the highest-quality songs because most newsgroup users are not only technically savvy enough to understand how to navigate and post files to a newsgroup in the first place, but they’re conscientious enough to post the best quality files possible. Many people who post files in newsgroups even include NFO files that describe each song’s bit rate, the MP3 encoder used, the program used to process the file, and occasionally a short review describing why they posted the release. Some newsgroup files also come with scans of the CD case covers, including any booklets and track listings.

Both FTP and websites also offer consistently high-quality music files. FTP site administrators offer only high-quality audio files because doing so attracts more people to their site who will subsequently upload files to expand the site’s music collection. Websites also want to attract people because the more people they attract, the more people they can bombard with advertisement-laden pop-up ads or spyware, thus earning the website administrator some extra cash.

Downloading music from IRC channels will usually snare you high-quality audio files, but it all depends on the person setting up the file server bot. Most people knowledgeable enough to set up a file server bot in an IRC channel will likely offer you the best audio files they have, but unlike web or FTP sites that offer quality files to attract people who will later upload audio files of equal quality, IRC users can possibly feed you poor quality files or bogus files. Most IRC file server bots can be trusted, but be careful anyway.

As a general rule, if you want point-and-click convenience along with the ability to search for specific songs, stick with file sharing networks. If you want to find rare songs from popular artists or bootleg live recordings, browse through newsgroups and IRC chat rooms. If file sharing networks frighten you off with the recording industry’s threat of surveillance and lawsuits, visit web and FTP sites to find your favorite songs. No matter which method you choose, you’ll be able to find practically any song that’s ever been recorded if you just look on the Internet long and hard enough.

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