Illegal mp3's

guitarboy2828 · 2009-11-18T20:48:45+00:00

So.. I thought I would just inform anyone on this forum who may be on the illegal side of life... Someone very close to me had their pc taken away due to c...

Illegal mp3's

singemonkey

Alan Ratcliffe wrote: I also had a few of the CDs made in a certain plant in the UK that turned golden coloured and became unplayable after 10 years. Lost my Discipline to that.

Jeez. That's hard-core. My very first CD "The Velvet Underground" by (guess who), still plays. Not a terrible CD if not exactly sparkling.

dee

What about all these mp3's that are offered as free downloads by the bands themselves, or by the record labels.

I have a lot of mp3's from many well known bands that I got like this. The latest was Dave Matthews releasing a compilation album about a month ago for free. What control is there for these? These are all DRM free as well.

singemonkey

They'll fine you R5K each. Stealing free stuff from hard-working musicians. You should be ashamed of yourself. ?

lindsmuse

I heard that the MP3 police were instructed to shoot first and ask questions after? ?

Byron

I have a question. Usually the cds that you buy have all the tracks at 128kbps ( That is what I have noticed) . Now how come you can download the same album at 320kbps for free ( and yes , illegally)

What cds have the 320kbps songs??? I've never got into the whole buying mp3s online scenario but with that can you download a 320kbps song?

RobK

I may be wrong, but I assume commercial cds are not created using mp3s at all but rather a full, uncompressed wav file of sorts (I stand to be corrected ) what you may be seeing is the bitrate you use to rip the cd to mp3 (128kbps) you can rip it using 320kbps instead if you like. Whatever software you use should be able to do it.

dee

RobK wrote: I may be wrong, but I assume commercial cds are not created using mp3s at all but rather a full, uncompressed wav file of sorts (I stand to be corrected ) what you may be seeing is the bitrate you use to rip the cd to mp3 (128kbps) you can rip it using 320kbps instead if you like. Whatever software you use should be able to do it.

CD's are uncompressed audio at 1,411.2 kbit/s, or more specifically 44100 samples per second × 16 bits per sample × 2 channels = 1411200 bps.

Most MP3 encoders can only encode up to 320 kbit/s, as that is all that is required from the MP3 ISO standard. Apparently LAME can encode up to 640 kbit/s, but I've never tried it.

FenderBender

@RobK: You are right about commercial CDs. The data is stored in cda (compact disc audio) format.

Data is sampled off the CD at around 1411 kbps* and quality is great, however recording in stereo for one minute requires about 10MB of storage. This is the exact reason audio compression algorithms were developed.

*2 channels x 44,100 samples per second per channel × 16 bits per sample = 1,411,200 bit/s = 1,411.2 kbit/s.

Byron

Eish. so all this time i've been doingitwrong. I always let windows media do it. Now i discover that it can go to 192kbps. Not bad, that was one of the main reason I didnt lean towards buying cds

RobK

WMP will go up to 320kbps for mp3 if you like.
If you have the disk space you could rip it to a losless format like wav. That should keep the he quality at its highest.

You're looking at between 50 and 70mb per song though.

doc-phil

I stumbled upon mp3va.com today... It has such a fancy website, selling every song under the sun for $0.15c. Can this be legal? It's based in Belarus, so I doubt it ? Whole albums go for about $1.50.

There's a legal notice saying that the service is legal as long as the songs/albums downloaded are used privately only. Plus there's no DRM. Now I'm pretty sure it's a dodgy site.. but its been operating since 2006.. if it's operating illegally, how has it survived so long? Is it a case of copyright laws in Belarus being outdated?

Plus what are the dangers of using credit cards on these sites? They could be stealing everybody's credit card and CVC numbers! If my parents came across that site I'm pretty sure they would think it's legit..