MP3 - the process?

This may appear a dumb question but I really have no idea about MP3. I'm about to get a new phone with an MP3 player. My boyfriend has an MP3 compatible car stereo and we're both pretty much clueless as to how the MP3 thing works. My sister has a laptop that I can download from. I want music on the move and not to have to carry around my bulky CD WALKMAN. lol. Any advice, instructions etc, would be greatly appreciated.

MP3 - the process?
Basically MP3 is just a type of audio file used for compressing sound (usually a piece of music) into a small file with hardly any loss in quality. In a normal recorded piece of music (such as on a CD), there are loads of sounds present that are not audible to the human ear. MP3 converter programs compress the music by taking out all these bits you can't hear.





You can download a piece of music from a website or transfer songs from a CD and store them on your PC or MP3 player in MP3 format. Then you can listen to the music on either device.


(Note: there are two main types of MP3 player - 'hard drive' MP3 players like an iPod or zen creative which can hold thousands of songs, or 'USB' MP3 players which are general smaller phyiscally and have less memory space).





HTH!
Reply:Don't bother with an MP3 phone. It's not worth the price. The phone will be more expensive than it should be, have inferior software, it will drain the battery of your phone much more quickly, and the cost to have storage on it is much higher than it is to simply by a stand alone MP3 player.





A gigabye SD card, which might hold less than 500 songs will cost you 100 dollars. Factor that in with the price of a phone and you're paying more than 300 dollars, and for that price you could just get yourself an 30GB ipod and a decent freebie phone or better.
Reply:WHATEVER YOU DO DO NOT BUY AN I-POD. they are crap pieces of plastic that break whenever you use them and you can get the same amount of music storage with another mp3 player. the creative Zen micro is good if you have a moderately sized collection. it is cheap and sturdy. but do some shopping and you WILL come up with a better deal rather than an i-pod. DO NOT BUY AN I-POD. THEY SUCK.
Reply:Mp3 is a file format that basically takes out the frequencies you dont hear from a piece of music. This allows it to pack a lot more songs into a lot less space........a normal writable CD holds about 18 normal (uncompressed) songs but probably something like 130 mp3 songs! What you need is a computer program that converts your CDs into Mp3s (or you can download them off the internet) and then use the computer to transfer them into your phone, or write an mp3 CD which your hubby's car stereo can play. go to http://download.com and do a search for 'Mp3 converter' to get one. Hope this helps!
Reply:When you purchase your phone it will most likely come with some sort of software to install to be able to download music. Mine came with one that allowed me to use Windows Media Player which was really simple. Then you download tunes from your favorite CD onto your computer (again if you have Windows Media Player you just choose "rip" and you can pick the tracks you want). Then you open the program for you mp3 player and download it into your phone. Some programs will allow you to download directly to the mp3 player but we don't have those as itunes and Windows Media Player require you to save it to the computer first. As for your boyfriends stereo he should have some sort of adapter or socket to be able to conect with the mp3 player. It would be a little more difficult without actually seeing it.
Reply:Mp3 is the format, there are many different "compression" rates for mp3. So far none of the commercial ones match CD quality, they are all just a bit better than the quality from an FM station, so..... you pays, they gives you crap, you accept it blinded by the techno b.s. most of the companies try. "Music on the move", will never provide the quality of sound a,"static", sound system will, however you could get a vast improvement with better quality headphones, not the excuse for earplugs that most manufacturers provide you with. All these new "systems" provide you with nothing new, just more of the same old junk, and they ask you to pay exorbitant prices for it as well. So go with it, buy what they tell you to buy, be a good little consumer, and don't question what you are told by these people.
Reply:I think an MP3 compatible stereo means it can play cds that have songs that are in the MP3 format. So you will still need cds for that - just ones that you have made yourself.


One of the best sites for MP3 are itunes you will pay aout 99c per song. I think there are sites to download for free but I don't know them. You should be able to just hook your phone up to a computer (it should hopefully come with a cable) and transfer them. Your phone may even come with software that you can load onto your computer to make it a bit easier.





The best way to learn is to play around a bit. Thats what I did when I got my iPod and now I know much more than when I started.





Goodluck