Main Area and Open Discussion > General Software Discussion

Music files 101

(1/8) > >>

SKesselman:
Hi,
I am in need of a quick and simple education in music files.
I mean, quick - no CNET courses or anything like that, just either a recommendation to a website that speaks to beginners, or instructions from someone here who would want to help a complete beginner. Here's what I'm looking to do:

I've recently inherited about 300 CD's (mostly classical).

I'm thinking of recording these CD's to an external drive, then posting the files to the web. But, I want a program that can read all of the details - I don't want to type in the name of the piece, the composer, etc. but I noticed that Windows Media Player could not detect all of this information, only some.
So, I ended up recording only 1 CD & decided it was too tedious of a project.

Now, I'm thinking that it would be really nice if my other family members could access this music online.
Actually, I'd like to share it with anyone who wanted it, but I guess that's not legal (?).
I was thinking about FTP web sites - I've only seen one & it looked pretty straightforward, but I don't even know if that's used for music files or what.

If you're still reading this, you can see that I'm clueless & so I don't have to tell you I don't have a server, an iPod or any knowledge of any computer languages. Only a laptop which records CDs & an external drive. And a really big box of CDs.

Any help would be appreciated!

Darwin:
Hi Sarah,

The legality of ripping the CDs to digital format is a grey area these days, depending on where you are... However, I'd suggest that no matter where you are, sharing them over the net with family will certainly violate copyright law, so tread carefully.
 
Having the CDs auto-recognized is usually pretty good in Windows Media Player. You could also try iTunes or Yahoo Music Manager (or whatever it is now called - I used MusicMatch Jukebox). The only other application I've tried is MusicIP Mixer. My experience with all of them has been that pop and rock CDs are generally recognized without fuss or fanfare while jazz and classical are far more hit and miss. Also, while it's been a while since I did this regularly, and I thus I may be out of step, I believe that all of the applications I mentioned access the same CDDatabase so you probaby won't have much luck switching from Windows Media Player. You could try seeing if you can try alternatives from within WMP (warning: I just took a quick look and couldn't find any option to do this on WMP 11 under XP Pro).

I'm sure someone here will provide a definitive answer shortly. Good luck!

CWuestefeld:
Bearing in mind that IANAL:

Making a copy of the music for your own use is fine, although the RIAA will tell you otherwise. The DMCA doesn't apply because you're not defeating any copy protection in ripping a standard CD.

But, as Darwin noted, sharing the results with others is (depending on where you are) almost certainly illegal, regardless of whether you use web sites, FTP, or what-have-you. In practice, if you put the music onto a server that no one knows about, with no public links to it, and they're stored in password-protected archives so that no one outside your family can actually see the content, then you'd probably get away with it. But I'm not recommending that.  :-\

I also agree on the metadata. AFAIK, all the various tools (WMP, iTunes, or my favorite ripper, Exact Audio Copy) rely on the same CDDB service. If WMP's query to CDDB doesn't yield results, then the same query made by EAC won't fare any better.

For commercially-produced CDs of contemporary genres this almost never happens. But it's different for classical music. For one, classical music has a smaller audience than NSync (sad as that might be). So there are fewer people entering the data.

But also, classical CDs are frequently "shovelware". Companies can produce these for next to nothing (no copyright royalties, just pay an orchestra for its time and you're done), and thus reap huge profit margins. I'd guess that there are hundreds of versions of, say, any of Beethoven's major symphonies available for purchase. The identifying characteristics of one bargain-bin copy of Beethoven's 9th are completely unrelated to a different recording of it.

The result is that any given classical CD has a much lower chance of having a music lover enter the data into CDDB.

Shades:
On a side note:

While I'm aware that most classical music composers (Bach, Beethoven etc.) are being dead for quite some time now...longer dead than RIAA regulations, so their music is copyright free.

Now I heard something about still living descendants that can claim rights. Is this true?  

Darwin:
Shades - can't comment on your specific question, but note that the RIAA also covers specific performances and associated media... so they'll STILL come after you!

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page