Tune-Toting Tech: Get the Most From Your MP3 Player

Fill It Up

An MP3 player without music is like a car without gasoline. So where do you go to fill up your player's fuel tank? You have two main options. You can download MP3 files from the Internet, or you can rip (that's geek talk for making a digital copy) a music track from a CD. For step-by-step instructions on general CD ripping and burning, check out "How to Burn Without Getting Singed," and for details on how to make a CD with tracks from multiple albums, see "Create a Party CD on Your PC."

Downloading music files from the Web is relatively straightforward. You usually click an icon or text listing for the music track and then download the file just like any other file. With rare exceptions (often related to odd bit rates), you should be able to play any MP3 file on your MP3 player.

In the case of WMA files, if you're using Windows Media Player to rip the tracks, you'll need to make sure that copy protection is turned off to play your WMA files on other devices. (To do so, in Windows Media Player, click Tools, Options, and select the Copy Music tab. Then uncheck the box beside Copy Protect Music.) Note that WMA files can play on any WMA-compatible device, unless they're copy-protected with Microsoft's Digital Rights Management. For more details on DRM, see Microsoft's site. Even if your player can handle copy-protected WMA files, they may be restricted to a specific device or expire after a certain number of days. The download site should have information about any restrictions associated with its copy-protected WMA files.

Broadly speaking, you can divide MP3 sites into those that offer free music and those that charge for music. Just as a baker might mark down the price for day-old bread, the free sites often have music that's less current, and therefore less in demand. The most notable exception is when a recording label allows a single track to be downloaded for free in order to encourage sales of an album.

Just one or two years ago, many critics had written off the viability of pay-to-play MP3 sites, arguing it's impossible to compete against pirated music. Apple has proven the critics wrong with the success of its ITunes Music Store, where you can download a music track for 99 cents. Rather than having to purchase an entire album, you can buy and download the individual tracks you want. ITunes has more than 500,000 tracks in just about every genre of music. The tracks are stored in the ACC file format, though Apple's free ITunes software lets you easily convert them to MP3 files. To read about one PC World editor's experience with the store, see "The Playlist: My Love/Hate Relationship With ITunes."

You may remember Napster as the quasi-legal music service that was forced to shut down two years ago. It has been reborn as a fully legal pay-to-play site boasting what it refers to as the largest catalog of online music, with more than 500,000 music tracks. Napster 2.0 has a flexible price scheme that can fit a variety of budgets. You can download a single track for 99 cents, purchase an entire album for $10, or stream entire songs (rather than the usual 30-second clips) to your computer for $10 a month. Unfortunately, you can't save the streamed songs. The monthly subscription is more of an expanded preview than a useful method for getting music into your MP3 player.

One of the most convenient pay-to-play sites for owners of MP3 players is EMusic. All the music tracks are already in the MP3 format, so you don't have to mess with converting files as you do with ITunes. And none of the music tracks uses copy protection--you can easily copy them to your MP3 player. The downside? EMusic doesn't have the most popular bands. It does have an extensive library of independent artists, traditional music, and world music. At press time, subscriptions varied from $10 a month with 40 song downloads to $20 a month with 90 song downloads. There's also a free two-week trial with 50 song downloads.

Some of the popular pay-to-play music services are designed more for listening to--rather than saving--music files, though they may allow you to save some of the tracks to a CD. MusicNet is a monthly subscription service that's available only to AOL members. Prices range from $4 to $18 a month, and you have the option with the more expensive packages to burn a limited number of tracks to a CD. The Rhapsody music service takes a similar two-tiered approach. You pay $10 a month for full access to stream any of the service's 20,000 albums, but have to pay an additional 79 cents to burn a track to a CD. While these music sites aren't as convenient for MP3-player owners as the sites that let you download MP3 files directly, it's relatively easy to rip a burned CD and copy the resulting MP3 files to your player.