The music is not even close to CD quality. Why is this so popular??
An average CD quality song is around 25meg. The music I've downloaded is under 1 meg in size and of course sounds like crap. I'm new to downloading....crap, am I doing something wrong??

Thanks

Cognitive Dissonance: The enemy of the mind

Uhm.. probably. Usually the digital music is from 1-5 megs depending on the kbit rate it was ripped at. You're either downloading non-mp3/vqf/wma or you're download low kbit audio.. maybe 96kbit or lower. If you want more CD quality music you need to get 128kbit and up. Of course, the higher the bitrate the bigger the size. The internet standard is probably 128kbit.

(in reply to Despotes)

I 've been downloading mp3 songs using the highest available quality,
still sound low grade. What sites do you recommend for downloading and do you have any other tips? I'm using a 56k modem, American version of the Plextor24-10-40 bundled with Easy CD Creator.
Thanks

Cognitive Dissonance: The enemy of the mind

(in reply to Despotes)

With the absense of Napster now, i've found WinMX to be great!! You can specify what bit rate/s you are looking for and even connection speeds. Try it out, it's great and if you download 256kbit songs you'll on average get good sounding music. 128k doesn't do the trick these days. The file size will be much larger though, 5-10 megs per song. [url]www.winmx.com[/url]

HITbb75

(in reply to Despotes)

Even if u d/l a song with a bitrate higher than 192 it might sound like crap. The bitrate is not the only important thing, in fact the program used for encoding from wav to mp3 is the most important thing for a good quality mp3. You can find a 256 kbps mp3 encoded with Xing that sounds worst than a 128 kbps in variable bitrate encoded with Lame. So the bitrate is not the main point for a good mp3.

In other words, if you want to d/l good mp3's you need tons of luck

I'm not english, i'm not even human, so stop laughing about my grammar

(in reply to Despotes)

if you are able to exhibit a bit of patience, try using newsgroups. not only do you almost only find whole albums instead of the one or two popular tracks, but you also get very good quality rips for the most part. very rarely do i find a post that is poor quality.

(in reply to Despotes)

News groups r also notorious for viruses as well. Be warned.

(in reply to Despotes)

Kazaa or Morpheus from MusicCity.com is very good for music and video downloads.

Pentium II-350
PcChips BX M747 m/b
384Mb RAM
Lite-On LTN-526 CD-ROM
Ricoh 20x10x40
Windows ME/XP (Dual)

(in reply to Despotes)

I am a dj, guess what I do most of the time....duh...download mp3's anywhere everywhere.I download the fastest smallest files I can find...then deal with files quality later. There are tons of sound editor programs out there.Just pick one and save all your mp3's to a folder and edit to as much as you have hardrive space for.
And if you want Cd's buy Cd's so we can keep downloading them.

(in reply to Despotes)

I downloaded the whole Smashing Pumpkins album Machina 2 and the songs ranged from 5Mb to 16 Mb. Sound quality is not CD but it's ok.

(in reply to Despotes)