Ever dream of being a record producer? Or do you simply wish that the record industry would make a compact disc with all of your favorite hits collected together in one place?
Well, if you don't mind spending a few hundred dollars for a special CD-ROM drive that can record compact discs, your dreams can come true.
Called CD-R, short for compact disc recordable, these special CD-ROM drives can both play standard CD-ROMs and record onto special blank CD-R media - discs that you can then play in any audio CD or CD-ROM drive.
Although so-called ``write-once CD-ROM drives'' have been around for years, the prices of both the drives and the media have plummeted recently. You can now buy CD-R drives for as little as $400. And you can buy blank CD-R media for 79 cents a disc if you buy a 10-pack and take advantage of the manufacturer's $20 per pack rebate.
I recently bought a Yamaha CD-R400atx. The drive came with two programs from Adaptec. The first is a disk duplication program, the second is a program for making your own original CDs.
To duplicate a disk, you just put the original into your computer's primary CD-ROM drive, put a piece of blank media into the CD-R drive, and run Adaptec's program. It took me approximately an hour to replicate my copy of Microsoft Office '97. The program can also make perfect digital copies of audio CDs, although this feature didn't work for me under Windows NT.
Adaptec's program warns that it is against the law to copy a disc without the permission of the copyright holder. If that's true, then didn't I just break the law? Well, that depends on what I do with the copy. Giving them away or selling them would be illegal, but my copy of Office '97 is a backup. If I scratch the original (which I've done before), I'll still be able to get the files I need off the disc. As for the audio CD, it's also a backup: I can play the copy in my car, where it is likely to get scratched or warped from the heat, and leave the original safe on the shelf in my living room.
But making perfect copies is just the beginning. Instead of copying an entire disc, you can also copy just a track at a time. So with a stack of CD-R media and an afternoon of free time, you can quickly assemble your own collection of ``greatest hits'' CDs featuring the music of your favorite groups. Be sure to label the discs with a big black marker when you take them out of the drive. It's all too easy to get the blank discs confused.
A standard CD will store 74 minutes of sound or 650 megabytes of data, which works out to roughly 9 megabytes per minute. But with compression, you can do more - much more, in fact.
Many computer users are already familiar with compression technology. Got a lot of files that you want to send to somebody over the Internet? Just squish them together with PKZIP, a popular shareware utility. Indeed, most of the images downloaded over the Internet are already compressed using either the GIF or JPEG compression algorithms.
For music, the hottest compression technology on the Internet is MP3. With MP3, you can take a song and crunch it down to a few megabytes of data. Already, some garage bands have started selling ``singles'' of their music on floppy disks, playable on any PC with a freely available MP3 player. Other bands are putting their music on the Internet, letting anybody download it for free.
One particularly interesting MP3 program is MusicMatch, which combines an MP3 player with a recorder. Run MusicMatch and put an audio CD into your computer's CD-ROM drive. MusicMatch will then take each track from the CD and compress it using the MP3 technology. You can download MusicMatch from www. musicmatch.com. The player is free, but the MP3 encoder costs $29.95.
If you have the disk space, you can leave all of your MP3 files on your computer's hard drive. Then, whenever you want to hear a song, just click on the title. With MusicMatch, you can have hundreds of CD titles at your fingertips.
Alternatively, you can take the MP3 files and record them onto a CD-R. Then, instead of having just 74 minutes of sound, you can store nearly 11 hours' worth. But be warned: You can only play this disc back through another computer that has an MP3 player.
Boosters of MP3 say the system is CD-quality. In my testing it isn't. Music that was compressed with MP3 lacked the richness and depth of music directly off the audio CD. But unless you do a side-by-side comparison, it's easy to put up with the inferior quality.
I'm thinking about compressing all of my audio CDs and storing them on my file server. Then I'll be able to play my music through any computer in my house. I'll also be able to play the music when I'm on Martha's Vineyard, since I have a high-speed connection between the two locations.
As you might imagine, the recording industry is having a fit. MP3 makes it all too easy to transmit high-quality music over the Internet. And already there are countless pirate sites, with millions of dollars worth of music available for downloading.
But technologies like CD-R and MP3 aren't going to go away. In fact, they're only going to get better. And some artists have already figured out ways of using it to make money by selling their songs directly to fans. After all, if it only cost a nickel to download a new song from your favorite band, why would you want to rip them off by downloading that same song from a pirate Web site?
Technology writer Simson L. Garfinkel can be reached at plugged-in@simson.net.
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