t was a typical day in my office. I had just destroyed three Iomega Jaz cartridges by attempting to change their formatting directly from Macintosh to NTFS (Windows NT's file system). Don't try this at home-it will ruin the cartridge. Always format it as a DOS FAT file system first and then format it as NTFS using the "Quick Format" option.
Sullen and frustrated, I was looking for a bottle of isopropyl alcohol to clean the accumulated layer of hacker scum off my keyboard when Tony (whose name has been changed to protect the guilty) trotted in and slammed a CD jewel case on my desk. "Check it out," he said, "I got it off the Internet."
I noticed immediately that the CD-ROM had the gold waxy sheen of a "one-off," a writable CD used by inexpensive WORM (Write Once, Read Many) drives. I popped the CD into my PC and opened the 30-Mbyte sound file on the disk using an included sound utility. Awesome sound came out of the speakers. I recognized it from a CD I already owned. This music had apparently
been sampled from a commercial audio CD and then compressed using the recent MPEG-I Audio Layer 3 standard (MP3 for short). An entire 35-minute audio CD holding about 400 Mbytes of uncompressed music had been compressed into a single 30-Mbyte sound file.
Compressing 35 minutes of audio into 30 Mbytes wouldn't be such a big deal except that the sound I heard was indistinguishable from my audio CD. The only real difference: This music was downloaded from an Internet FTP site and burned onto a CD using a $700 recordable CD-ROM drive from Philips Electronics NV. The whole process was inexpensive, reasonably fast-and very illegal.
Of course, pirating music over the Internet has been possible for a long time, but the MP3 standard has made it much more feasible by enabling 12-to-1 compression of CD-quality sound without a noticeable loss of quality. Already, several FTP sites have been busted for offering MP3 files of copyrighted music. Still, the potential benefits for multimedia CD-ROM producers and legiti
mate resellers of music are great. Vendors of streaming network audio solutions also stand to benefit.
Lots of shareware MP3 encoders and decoders are now available. A good place to start looking for them, and for more information, is at
www.mpeg.org
or
barista.stanford.edu/m3c
.
But don't do anything illegal, OK?
You can read his Internet Zone column on InformationWeek Online at
techweb.cmp.com/iw/author/internet.htm
.
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t was a typical day in my office. I had just destroyed three Iomega Jaz cartridges by attempting to change their formatting directly from Macintosh to NTFS (Windows NT's file system). Don't try this at home-it will ruin the cartridge. Always format it as a DOS FAT file system first and then format it as NTFS using the "Quick Format" option.
