More about Mp3's
The following is an excerpt from an article graciously given with permission from
 
 
www.TheTravelInsider.info
Thanks David
Making MP3 recordings from your CDs and tapes might seem more complicated than simply copying them onto a cassette, but once you understand the basic settings, it becomes very easy indeed.

MP3 explained
MP3 is a way of compressing sound files into smaller sizes. Just like jpg compression makes picture files smaller, so too can MP3 compression make sound files smaller (than, for example, they are on a regular CD).
MP3 files contain music. MP3 files can also hold considerable information about the piece of music such as the name of the artist, the song title, and various other information as well.
MP3 files have become an industry standard format that most computer music playing programs can play.

How to Make an MP3 File from a CD (or other source)

You need a program to convert the music from the CD or tape or whatever into MP3 format. There are plenty to choose from, and most are quite inexpensive. Perhaps the best known, and the one I use myself, is MusicMatch. Another popular program is Easy CD-DA. Microsoft's Windows Media Player can also do this if you buy a small add-on to the program.
Simply put a CD in your CDrom, start up your program (sometimes it will even start automatically, change a few settings, then hit the record button. Easy!

Compression - Something for Nothing?

The most distinctive thing about an MP3 file is that it is very much smaller than a regular CD file - typically only one tenth the size of a CD file. In other words, the music data has been compressed.
You have a choice of many different levels of compression. But you don't get something for nothing - the more compressed the file, the poorer the sound quality. Choosing the right amount of compression involves a trade-off between sound quality and file size.
The type of sound quality that is 'best' for you depends on how discerning a listener you are, and how you will be listening to the music. If you are listening to it through a car stereo system, then you don't need as good a quality as if you are listening to the music through a set of high end headphones. If you are playing the music back through a small set of cheap speakers, you again don't need the same quality as if you are playing it through a $10,000 hi-fi system.

The Best Compression Compromise

If you are short of file space and do not care about the music quality too much, compress at a sampling rate of 128 kb/sec. If you have more space and want audibly better sounding music, then increase to 160 kb/sec. If you want to have excellent quality music, almost as good as on a CD, then use a 192 kb/sec rate.
It is possible to compress at rates as high as 320kb/sec, but you're really starting to get into diminishing returns when climbing over 192kb/sec.
This is what is known as 'constant bit rate' (CBR) compression. There is also a different form of compression called 'variable bit rate' (VBR) compression. This works on the basis that sometimes music can be compressed a lot, and sometimes it needs to be much less compressed to preserve its quality. If you choose VBR, start with a setting around 50% - the higher the percentage, the better the quality (and the larger the file size).

Other Recording Settings

There are several other important settings that you need to optimize in your program.
The first of these is to set your program to take digital audio from the CDrom drive, not analog audio. Look for a setting somewhere in your recording settings - it might say 'DAE' or 'Digital recording mode'. If there is an 'error correcting' option, take this, too.
Maybe there is a bandwidth option - to choose how high the maximum frequency you will encode is. The human ear, in theory, can hear up to about 20kHz, but this ability drops off with age. Most speakers do not play sounds this high in any case. The lower the bandwidth, the better the quality of the remaining music. I'd suggest setting somewhere between 15kHz and 18kHz as optimum, and if you have poor quality speakers, you could even go down as low as 12kHz. Changing the bandwidth setting does not change the file size.
Maybe your program also has an option to specify how carefully it compresses the music. This might be referred to as 'encoding' or 'processing'. The higher you set this, the better the sound quality will be - without causing the file size to grow. For that reason, I always set the processing to 'maximum'. The only trade-off here is that it really slows down the speed at which a CD is converted to MP3.
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