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This article first appeared in the May 1999 issue of the Louisville Computer News. It was written by Lee Larson.
The hot item on the Web right now is MP3. "MP3" is more popular than "sex," at least in the list of most-used words on the major Internet search engines. The latter had been the reigning champion for years. All the recording industry executives hate MP3, and everybody else seems to love it.
For those not up on the latest Web fads, MP3 is short for MPEG-1 Layer 3, a method to compress high quality sound into a small package with almost the same fidelity as the original. MP3 works its magic by first removing parts of an audio signal most people can't hear, such as high frequency sounds, and then compressing the file. It is common for an MP3 file to be a tenth the size of the original. Typical songs are well under three megabytes in size.
The 'Net is littered with thousands of MP3 sites offering legal and illegal MP3's for download. MP3 seems destined to become the next big media format for music.
Anyone with speakers or headphones on their Mac and MP3 player software can hop onto the Internet and download MP3 files to play at their leisure. Even better, several companies are producing tiny, personal, portable MP3 players to store and play back the MP3 files downloaded from your computer. They're kind of like a portable CD player that can't skip. One such unit with Mac software is the MPlayer3 (www.mplayer3.com).
There are several software alternatives for MP3 playback on the Mac. It seems that those who are heavily into the Internet music scene favor the MacAMP player (www.macamp.com). It comes in two versions: a freeware MacAMP Lite and a more fully-featured version simply called MacAMP. Although it works well, MacAMP is still in beta testing. The idea is that when the beta phase is over, it will become a commercial product.
Not being a heavy MP3 listener, the player I use most often is the freeware Swiss Army Knife of Macintosh sound programs, SoundApp (www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~franke/SoundApp/). Not only does it play MP3 files, but it plays and converts between just about every digital sound format known to man or beast. Just arriving on the scene is the newly available QuickTime 4 from Apple. QT4 can handle most MP3 cuts, but it cannot play a form called variable bit-rate MP3, which is becoming more common.
It's almost as easy to make MP3 files as it is to play them. Seemingly hundreds of Garth Brooks wannabes are promoting themselves by letting anyone download MP3 cuts. Even established artists like Neil Young, Tom Petty and ICE-T are putting demo cuts from their latest CD's on-line.
But, another side to this makes music industry executives break out in cold sweats. There are many free and inexpensive shareware programs that can copy a track from an audio CD and turn it into an MP3 file. Thousands of copyrighted recordings can be found on the Internet without much effort. Music industry executives are talking about losing billions of dollars, and they are frantically trying to figure out a way to embed copyrights into digital media. Although the ever sensationalist press often tries to ignore it, there are legitimate reasons to convert CD tracks into MP3. For example, I know several people who convert tracks on CD's they own so they can listen to music from their PowerBook while traveling without having to hassle with the disks. It also allows them to listen to music while they use the CD drive to run programs or read data.
To do such converting, most cognoscenti say that AudioCatalyst, which runs about $30 from Xing Technology, is the best software. AudioCatalyst can transform standard CD audio tracks into MP3 in one easy step. There does not seem to be a clean one-step freeware way to do the same thing, but the combination of InCDius , Track Thief and Mpecker will do the job.
One inventive use of MP3 is to convert an aging and irreplaceable collection of LP's into digital form. This relatively is a straight forward procedure on most Macs because of their built-in sound sampling hardware. With programs such as the shareware Sound Sculpture or the powerful and Macromedia's expensive commercial program Soundedit 16 , it's easy to sample your LP's at the standard CD rate of 44.1 kHz. Once the sampled sounds are on your hard drive, SoundApp can be used to convert the file to MP3, or any other format you desire. An acquaintance of mine is using a CD-Writer to transform his beloved old LP's into CD's-right along with all their scratches and pops..
Steve Jasik, a long acknowledged master of Mac software debugging has found and fixed what he calls a "nasty bug in Mac OS 8.5 and later systems." He goes on to say "The manifestation of the bug is random tromping of memory and sometimes it corrupts the heap when an application is launched. The problem is that some programmer did a Load Contents when he meant to do a Load Address." More information and patches for the problem can be found at http://aardvark.magnet.at/software/patches.html#membug.
A milestone of sorts was passed on April 16 when Guy Kawasaki announced the retirement of the popular EvangeList. EvangeList was a very pro-Macintosh mailing list started by Kawasaki several years ago when Apple was battered and on the ropes. Its unabashed purpose was to give positive news about Apple and the Macintosh to counter the steady drumbeat of doom and gloom coming from the mainstream computer press.
EvangeList was enormously successful, with almost 50,000 subscribers at its height of popularity. According to Kawasaki "The original purpose of EvangeList was to counteract the negative news about Apple and Macintosh, and I believe that EvangeList has served its purpose-fantastically, as a matter of fact. So after discussing what we should do with EvangeList with the folks at Apple, we've decided to retire the list."
Of course, there are hundreds of other Macintosh oriented e-mail lists available. Apple maintains a database of them at www.lists.apple.com. MacGroup is a Louisville area list sponsored by the Louisville Computer Society .
Of course, the big news from Apple last month was the release of Mac OS X Server. This is the first big push by Apple to move away from the older Mac OS and into a more modern operating system. Before the end of the year, Apple is promising a personal version of Mac OS X which can run most properly written Mac OS 8 applications on G3 Macintoshes.
The current release of Mac OS X Server has the capability of running Mac OS 8 programs, but Apple has been conspicuously playing down this capability because speed and reliability aren't yet too spectacular.
No matter what Apple calls it, Mac OS X Server is a BSD/Mach Unix with software running on top to make it more Mac-like. In fact, one of Apple's main selling points is that it runs the Apache Web server, the standard server for Unix systems on the Internet. About half the Web servers on the Internet run Apache software.
The only big surprise accompanying the roll out of Mac OS X Server was the new open source initiative called Darwin. As part of this project, Apple has made much of the source code for Mac OS X freely available on-line (www.apple.com/darwin).
Initial reaction from the open source movement was mixed. Eric Raymond, one of the leaders of the open source movement said "The Open Source Initiative hopes that Apple's decision to 'open source' its core OS code will point the way for other computer and systems manufacturers to 'open source' their operating systems." Others criticized the terms of Apple's license, and pointed out that much of what Apple "opened" were actually standard Unix tools that were open already. For example, Apache has always been open source. But, they've not opened some other parts such as the interface to run standard Mac OS software.
While all this was happening, Apple's other hand has continued developing Mac OS 8.6 for the rest of us. It entered final beta testing in mid-April, and should be released by late May. Although Apple has not officially announced pricing, there is every indication that the upgrade will be available as a free download.
At the May 25 meeting of the Louisville Computer Society, Courier Journal photo editor, Bill Luster, will present a demonstration of a $60 program called Slides and Sounds Plus. Using digital photos and this program, a Macintosh computer user can produce slide shows. To date Luster has created two shows: a Holiday Card he sent out to friends over Christmas, and The Ohio Amish. He's currently working on a project called The Bluegrass. In addition to showing the two slide shows Luster will demonstrate how the slide shows are put together.
The Louisville Computer Society meets from 7:009:00 P.M. at Pitt Academy, 4605 Poplar Level Road, at the intersection of Poplar Level Road and Gilmore Lane. Everyone is welcome to attend. For more information, on the web go to www.aye.net/~lcs, or e-mail lcs@aye.net.
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