NVMUG eNews 6/19//2002
Last updated 6/27//2002
Geof Gonter Demonstrated Music on the Macintosh
Geof Gonter demonstrated how to locate, download, and use music from the Internet. See the first article which begins with the newspaper report, and follows up with more details.
1. Geof Gonter on using your Mac to get music, Caledonian Record article
1. Geof Gonter on using your Mac to get music, Caledonian Record article.
Geof Gonter demonstrates for members, Sidney, Tom & Grace
The Caledonian Record on Tuesday, June 18, carried a photograph with an article about the meeting. The article with added information for NVMUG members follows. The picture will be available on our web site soon.
Geof Gonter demonstrated finding, downloading, and using music via the Internet at the Northern Vermont Macintosh User Group meeting at Dora's Taxi in St. Johnsbury on Saturday. Geof used Midge Lubot's iBook, one of Dora's Taxi's monitors, and a CD of applications that he brought with him from New Hampshire.
Music from the Internet is a touchy subject. some is available for free downloading. Many artists make most of their money through their performances. Most of them do not mind if people download a song of theirs if it brings them to a performances, or if people like the song and decide to buy the CD.
Some music is available for downloading for a fee. You can download a single tune for something like $3.00. Downloading a whole CD may cost $10 for a little savings, and saving you a trip to the store if you burn your own CD. Of course if you have a slow modem connection it might take up to 18 hours to download.
Some music is available for free against the wishes of the artist or publisher. The artists who are most concerned are usually those who own their own publishing company.
Geof demonstrated using LimeWire to locate music. You can use an index for different kinds of music and search individual tunes by artist, title, or name of the CD. Geof searched for and found several titles by the Grateful Dead. The songs listed are on individual computers that are connected to the Internet and whose owners have made the files available for downloading. The quality of the sound is indicated by the number of stars shown.
Geof started downloading a song on a normal 56K modem. Downloading individual songs on a regular modem is slow, but doable. Geof has a cable connection, so he can download whole CDs in something like an hour and a half, which he does from newsgroups using MT-Newswatcher.
While the song was downloading, Geof demonstrated playing another song using iTunes. iTunes if very easy to use, but Geof prefers to use SoundJam which he was using before iTunes came out.
Most music that you download is condensed in MP3 form. MP3 music does not have the same quality as an original CD, but Geof defies an average person to tell whether original music or an MP3 is playing.
When Geof checked on the downloading progress, 54% was downloaded, but we had lost the connection. LimeWire can sometimes restart from where it left off using Force Renew, but first you have to find the original connection and the individual computer you were connected to may no longer be online. We were not able to complete this download.
2. More details from Geof Gonter for NVMUG member
There are a number of ways to find music on the Internet with your Macintosh.
LimeWire is available on a regular basis to find individual songs. What it does is help you to find music which is available for you to download from personal computers. Geof uses an OS 8.6 - 9.1 version which he likes because it is more stable. There is a new OS X version, but it may not be as stable yet.
Other sources similar to LimeWire include Napster (which now charges for the music), Mactella (which is the Mac version of Gnutella), Audio Galaxy, and iSwipe.
The IRC, Internet Relay Chat, also contains a lot of Mac chats including messages from individuals who have music available for you to download. You need a chat client program, like IRCL 3.0.4 which is $20 shareware, to use IRC. Some music is available from web sites and is available to download via FTP, File Transfer Protocol, program like Fetch, which is $25 shareware, to retrieve the music files.
If you are baud rate challenged, that is you have an ordinary modem, you will want to stick to single songs in a compressed format, MP3, and then it takes quite awhile to download. Geof says that any MP3 with at more than 256k is an awful waste. For shorter download times select lower fidelity.
DSL is available in Cabot, because of Cabot Creamery, which runs at about twice the theoretical speed of a 56k modem. It costs about $40 or $50 a month, but saves getting an extra line, and you do not have to wait for a dial up connection. Erik Mueller-Harder was told that he would have to install his DSL modem, but he just connected it and it worked. You have to be within about 3 miles from the telephone company for DSL.
Erik pays $35.95 to the phone company (Northland Telephone) and another $19.95 to the ISP (Pivot.Net). This gives him nearly 100% up time, a communication rate of about 125 kbps, and no busy signals. The DSL modem cost $325.To use POTS (Plain ol' telephone service) by contrast, the message-unit charge would cap out at about $30 or $35, he'd have to pay at least $14.95 (more likely $19.95) to an ISP, and he'd have to dial in, he'd get 53 kbps at best, and he'd tie up his phone line.
Geof has a cable connection which can download a whole CD in about an hour and a half, whereas with an ordinary modem it would take an eternity. Geof has about 35 MP3 CDs, which is an awesome amount of music.
Some companies lend you the cable (or DSL) modem, but with others you have to buy them.
MP3 is not the only way to download music. You can also download some music with 100% digital copies in binary form. Some copies of concerts are available with the permission of the artist.
Geof uses MT-NewsWatcher 3.1(Use 3.2 with OS X) to research Macintosh information on news groups. This is another way to find music to download. You can download newsgroups as binaries. A program to connect the binaries such as UU Undo or Stuffit expander will be required. Newsgroups are not a good way to get individual cuts, generally more whole CDs. A lot of the time they will post Best Of CDs.
There is a lot of obscure jazz stuff and sound tracks. You can always make a request for a particular cut. Beware often new Ency format as the Mac does not yet handle it well with systems other than OS X.
More on the subject of ethics: There are legal places to buy stuff on the Internet. Some people argue that the companies are raking it in, not the artists. Most artists make most of their money on tour. Sixteen people heard a bootlegged MP3, and came to a performance and bought CDs.
Geof used Napster, downloaded a tune, listened to it, and liked it well enough to go to a music store and buy the CD. It is something everyone has to wrestle with.
For organizing, storing, and playing music, iTunes is free and easy to use. You can also burn CDs with the latest iTunes. Geof doesn't use iTunes. He finds it just as easy to drag tunes out of a folder. He prefers Soundjam to play them. He likes Soundjam's interface better, less cumbersome, and it does a lot of things that iTunes doesn't. Soundjam does not burn CDs. There are others available to play music.
Geof said that etree.org provides another way to present day concerts, jazz and blues. Geof said, etree.org explains how to use it. Here is the start of what you see when you connect :
Welcome to etree.org, the award-winning leader in lossless digital audio distribution on the Internet! We are a community committed to providing the highest quality live concerts in a lossless, downloadable format.
You can find nearly every band that allows taping in the jambands community on etree.org, including Phish, The Grateful Dead, The Seth Yacovone Band, String Cheese Incident, The Slip, Medeski, Martin & Wood, Umphrey's McGee, The Big Wu, Amfibian and The New Deal.
To be a part of the etree.org community, you'll need a high-speed Internet connection (cable modem, DSL, T1, or Ethernet), an FTP client to download the files and a CD-R writer. All necessary software is available for free at the GreenSite. Etree.org uses the Shorten (.shn) audio compression format because it creates an exact clone of the original source.
We do not distribute MP3 due to its lossy compression scheme which greatly degrades the quality of the audio. If you trade a CD-R's from MP3 audio, you are polluting the CD-R trading community.
Pease note: There is no actual music to download from here. This website simply provides the information and resources you will need to download music from Etree FTP Sites. To learn more about how this works please read this.
If you are interested, the full URL is:
http://www.etree.orgYou can also listen to music on the Internet without downloading it. Fordum University is a source of lots of jazz. You can stream at 56K if you are close to a telephone company. Geof used Real Audio. He set his VCR to tape, and recorded a streamed show from 8 to midnight. Sometimes he has to use Windows MediaPlayer, originally available on the PC, because there is some stuff out there that is not available for RealPlayer.
You can also stream with QuickTime, iTunes, or Soundjam.
MP3 players with readers work great. Be careful of the bit rate when burning MP3s on to CDs for CD-ROM units that playback MP3s. Geof found that he had to burn CDs at just the 2X rate, with a bit rate of 128, for them.
There are a lot of sites for midi's for people who use a Macintosh to connect to musical instruments. You need MacAMP to read them.
3. Other Items from the NVMUG Meeting
Geof said that New Hampshire is well wired compared to Vermont. In Conway there is a choice of 60 ISPs.
Geof gave away CDs with the following files:
- CDCoverTool 1.0
- Mactella_PPC
- MacSatellite
- LimeWire_Installer
- iSwipe 1.0
- WMPlayer7_1_EN
- uuUndo 1.0
- the package
- SoundJam MP Free
- MT-NewsWatcher-3.1.sit
- MT-NewsWatcher 3.1
- MP3s Indexes
CD cover files is a souce of CD cover graphics, not high resolution, but you can print them and use them in with CDs you have burned. CD cover works well. There is a $10 shareware fee.
iSwipe is different than LimeWire, is free, and it works.
The Package is a cataloger for CDs. It will browse the folder, the JPG will be there and the song list. Geof copies it onto card stock with the song titles and original cover, but very poor resolution. It is free. It is a neat simple program.
If you would like one of these files you can probably use the name of the program and Version Tracker to download the latest version.
Geof presented the demonstration while seated on a couch using Midge's iBook connected to a larger monitor, provided by Dora's Taxi, on an end table. It was a relaxed atmosphere, but I couldn't keep up with all of the information presented. I sent this to Geof before sending out this eNews, and asked him to correct major errors and make such other changes as he thought might help.
Grace Pipes from Barton asked how you delete all the addresses that appear on her browser. Geof put up Internet Explorer on the screen. If they are history addresses on Internet Explorer, go to the History tab, select all, and delete. Go to the Favorites menu, click Organize, then delete to delete favorites. But. only a limited number of History files are saved, and more than that are automatically deleted, so you do not have to worry about them.
Tom Cuddihy has ordered an eMac for $1,100 from Mac Zone. He might have saved $50 by buying through his school, but Mac Zone added extra RAM. It is about the same size as the older iMacs, has a 17 inch screen and is $350 cheaper. This 17 inch screen has a 16 inch viewing area, so it is not much bigger than the current iMac's 15 inch viewing area. The current LCD screen has less flicker, but some have a one or more pixels that do not work. Warren prefers a CRT for his color work.
Warren brought in pictures of new, rarer Vermont wildflowers. Gorgeous. He is getting them from as many different Vermont towns as possible. He bought a new larger memory card so he can shoot pictures as TIFF instead of JPG. With it he can take as many as 48 TIFF pictures and preserve all of the detail. He said he throws away at least 9 out of 10 pictures as snapshots. If you haven't seen his results, you should.
We will be going back to the St. Johnsbury Community Bank for our August meeting. We appreciate having this good meeting place, but we are a bit limited because we cannot get an outside connection to the Internet. There are lots things about the Internet that you cannot fake in a demonstration without being connected. We could meet in Wolcott, but that would be a long way for people from New Hampshire. Midge and Richard will watch for other possible meeting places. If you find a meeting place that is available for free and which offers a possible Internet connection, please let Midge know.
