Another is hard-rock songs for weekend evenings. One is filled with quiet songs for morning listening. When I hear something I don’t like, changing my mind - and changing the music - is a snap.įor fun, I’ve also been creating “playlists” of various songs. Instead of turning to old favorites again and again, I’m spending more time exploring the odd corners of my collection. Even better, I can easily find what I’m looking for by searching through or sorting the music by song title, artist, album, musical genre and more.Īs a result, I’m more adventurous in my listening. The sheer convenience of finding and selecting songs entices me to listen more often than when I had to swap CDs every 40 minutes or so. The changes this new arrangement has made in my listening habits are extraordinary.įor starters, I’m listening to a lot more music. (That’s $80 for the hard drive, $20 for MusicMatch Jukebox and $50 for the Xitel HiFi link). So there you have it: a completely digitized music collection for a total of $150. Play MP3 files or online music streams, and it comes right out of the stereo speakers. Using the Xitel HiFi link, my PC acts just like any other stereo component. Plug one end into your computer’s USB port, plug the other into your stereo, and you’re done. But because I’ve got a fairly good stereo, I shelled out $50 for the Xitel HiFi link (The “link” consists of a digital-to-audio converter about the size of a tube of toothpaste, along with a 30-foot-long stereo cord. Today’s PC sound systems compare favorably with low-end stereos. The fourth and final step was getting the music from the computer to the stereo system. In about three weeks, the whole job was done. My goal was to get through one letter of the alphabet each day (my music collection was alphabetized). The ripping process got tedious at times, but I kept at it. I knocked off a dozen an hour, on average - typically while watching TV or surfing the Net.Įven so, there were hundreds of CDs to contend with. (About one in 50 discs went unrecognized I had to manually type the information for those.)Ĭopying each audio CD to the hard drive took about 5 minutes. Whenever I placed an audio CD in my CD-ROM drive for copying, the software reached out across the Internet to identify the disc and download the album, artist and song titles. Here, MusicMatch Jukebox was indispensible. Step 3 involved the real work in this project: ripping the CD collection, disc by disc, onto the hard drive. Perhaps your golden ears would notice a difference, but mine couldn’t. And I have a pretty good stereo system, too. In multiple tests, I could not tell the MP3 song from the actual CD. I went one step better than “CD quality” by settling on a bitrate of 256 kilobits per second (kpbs) - not the very highest available, but close. One bitrate is described as “FM radio quality,” another as “near CD quality” and another as “CD quality.” MusicMatch offers several MP3 “bitrates,” a term that defines how detailed the recorded MP3 will be. I wanted my MP3s to sound good, but I didn’t want them to be unnecessarily large. I puzzled for some time over the question of how small to make the song files. It’s like a digital picture: The smaller the file, the less detail the picture has. Exactly how small those MP3 files get depends on how much sonic detail you’re willing to sacrifice. (When you’re done, the software also helps organize and play the MP3 songs.)ĭuring the conversion and shrinking process, some musical detail is lost. Users of Musicmatch Jukebox Deluxe gave it a rating of 4 out of 5 stars.Step 2 was converting the audio CDs to MP3 song files.įor that, I chose a software program called MusicMatch Jukebox, which is free to download and $20 to register (MusicMatch copies, or “rips,” the song files from audio CDs and compresses them into smaller MP3 files. Musicmatch Jukebox Deluxe runs on the following operating systems: Windows. The most prevalent version is 10.10.97, which is used by 33 % of all installations. It was initially added to our database on. The latest version of Musicmatch Jukebox Deluxe is 10.10.97, released on. It was checked for updates 188 times by the users of our client application UpdateStar during the last month. Musicmatch Jukebox Deluxe is a Commercial software in the category Audio & Multimedia developed by Pearson Education. You can also sort your music by 17 different categories including album, artist, track, genre, and mood. Manage your music with a powerful, easy-to-access music library. Easily transfer MP3 songs to portable MP3 players. Create playlists simply by dragging and dropping music files from your music library. Play MP3s, Windows Media Audio, CDs, video, and more. This all-in-one jukebox delivers a personalized, interactive music experience and gives you quick access to the music you program. MusicMatch Jukebox Deluxe lets you find, record, manage, and play your favorite music.
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