Playing Your Masterpiece

So you've gone and created tons of music and now you want to play it for the masses at one of your 100- hour -long rave parties. Well, read on, because now we'll discuss the creation of an MP3 jukebox to play your music.

Sixty to 80 hours of music is a pretty decent demand. An average CD holds a maximum of 74 minutes of audio. Those of you with CD-Rs and a good memory for arcane data will remember that 74 minutes of audio equals 650MB of data. So if we were to convert those time demands into minutes, we'd have 4800 minutes of music required. Well, since 74 goes into 4800 about 65 times, that means you get 65 CDs worth of music, or 42GB. Now, it is conceivable that you've got 42GB of spare space on your hard drive, particularly with the plummeting cost of storage these days. But if you're a college freshman, you've probably got an inordinate number of games on that PC (taking up a good portion of disk space) and some copies of the purity test as well. So we'll have to figure out a way to fit your 42GB of music into something less than 42GB of space.

Thankfully, we've got a trick up our sleeve: compression. A few years ago, a few clever gents came up with an audio-compression format called MP3. MP3 is actually shorthand for the full name of the compression: MPEG layer 3. MPEG compression is useful on sound and moving images (such as movies). What it does is basically shave off the highs and lows. We can get away with this because the human ear, while quite sensitive, is generally incapable of detecting all the quality that a CD can deliver. We can take a 74-minute CD and compress it down to about, oh, 75MB without losing a noticeable amount of quality. That's about a meg per minute. That means we can fit your 80 hours of music in 4800 MB, or 4.8GB. Not too shabby! With a little bit of overhead, we can simplify the formula a little more to say that 1GB of MP3s equals about 15 hours of good-quality music. This gets particularly attractive in light of what hard drives are costing these days. My employer just paid $150 for a fast 31GB drive, and that was far too much money. By the time you're holding this book, 30GB drives will probably be sub-$100 items.

Of course, once you've got a big pile of MP3s sitting on your Linux box, you're stuck without a cable that will let you plug your soundcard into your stereo. Why run a cable from your PC to your stereo? Because most complaints about PC audio are due to the low quality of PC speakers. MP3s that sound tinny or short on bass when played on my PC speakers sound fine when piped through my 12-year-old Fisher (now there's a high-quality name for audio!) stereo system. Make sure the cable you get is long enough to string from your PC soundcard to your stereo, and try to avoid linking extenders together. If worse comes to worst, you should be able to fabricate your own cable with a solder gun, a couple of connectors, and some cable.

Okay, so now you've got a big pile of MP3s and a PC that's wired into your stereo. What now? Good question! We'll need to find software that not only can play your MP3s, but also can randomize the list. (You wouldn't want people knowing the exact order of the music at your parties!)