Many music groups in the Bay Area are pretty tech-savvy, and count at least one former dot-commer among their ranks. But chances are you could still stand to learn a bit more about how to rip, record and/or encode your music for the Internet.
If you've been recording your music onto your hard drive with multitrack recording software (Pro Tools, CoolEdit, Logic, etc.), your first step is easy -- master your project and mix it down as a series of uncompressed files (WAV files on a PC, AIFF on a Mac).
But your source will most likely be physical: a CD, 7-inch single, LP, rehearsal tape, DAT or some other source. Here's how you turn those into 1s and 0s, using free or open-source software.
Rip your CD or demo
Mac people already know that iTunes is the ripper of choice. Windows users may want to try Exact Audio Copy (EAC) -- it's free, creates great-sounding rips and can sometimes read scratched CDs. Download and install EAC from www.exactaudiocopy.de/. Make sure Lame.exe is on your hard drive, or download it from one of the sites listed on the EAC website. L.A.M.E. stands for "Lame Ain't an MP3 Encoder," which is true -- it's just a codec (or COmpression DECompression algorithm, which crunches file sizes while preserving most of the original sound). Codecs are useless without a host program like EAC -- and EAC can't make MP3s without a codec.
When EAC is ready to go, rip the songs you want -- make sure the file is saved as a WAV, 32 kbps for lower quality, 192 kbps for higher quality. Choose the "Normalize" function to keep the volumes consistent -- too often, amateur MP3s sound quieter than commercial albums.
The saved WAV files (AIFF with Mac/iTunes) can be chopped up into Amazon.com-style 30-second samples or turned into RealAudio, Ogg Vorbis or whatever format you or your label/distributor prefer (see "Editing," below).
Record from vinyl, tape, DAT, etc.
Any decent sound card has an analog line-input (1/8th-inch stereo jack or dual RCA/stereo jack) or digital optical input, but the ones that process audio outside of the computer case ($30 Griffin iMic for Mac and Windows) or come from pro audio manufacturers sound better. No matter what you're using, connect your source to the line input, choosing the digital option if there is one. If your source is vinyl, make sure to run the signal through your amp or pre-amp first in order to boost the levels.
When it's all connected, set the levels and record as WAV or AIFF.
If you don't have professional recording software, try Audacity -- it's free, open-source and stable (Windows/Mac/Linux versions at audacity.sourceforge.net/). Use it to record the stereo tracks and edit them into separate files. The program exports to WAV/AIFF as well as MP3 (as with EAC, Audacity on Windows needs Lame installed in order to export to MP3).
Editing
If you want to make 30-second samples, open the song in Audacity and highlight the section you wish to sample. Use Audacity's "Export Selection" function to save the samples as MP3s.
Distribution
The coolest online distribution technique I've ever found involves wrapping your MP3s, album art and liner notes into a software package that can be uploaded to a Web page. When someone clicks the link to the package, the MP3s download to their hard drive, decompress themselves, find the person's CD burner and burn themselves onto a blank CD, playable on any stereo. They can print out the liner notes and art and create an official copy of your CD out of their own raw materials. Visit www.immediatek.com/ to download NetBurn Client, the shareware that allows you to do this yourself.
Keep your CD package at a secret or password-protected location on your website, and ask people who want to buy it to email you for instructions. When they've sent you the money over Paypal, walked your dog, written a decent haiku, or fulfilled whatever other requirements you have in mind, email them the URL of the CD and tell them to click it after inserting a blank CD into their burner. Soon they'll have a physical copy of your music, complete with cover art and liner notes.
Open licensing options
If you decide to offer downloads of your MP3s for free, it doesn't mean you have to forfeit your ownership of the music completely. Mark your free downloads with seals from the excellent Electronic Frontier Foundation (www.eff.org/), CreativeCommons.org, or one of the licensing organizations listed on the EFF's chart (www.eff.org/IP/Open_licenses/licensechart.html).
These let you specify usage rules easily, so that the general public can trade your work on P2P (peer to peer, like the late Napster program) sites, use it in their own commercial works, and make as many copies as they like, as long as they attribute the work to you and leave a link to your webpage embedded in the file.
Whew ... we covered a lot of ground there. Hopefully you have some new ideas on how to package your music for Internet distribution. Once you have your music stored in these formats, your promotional ingenuity is the only limit to how far your music can reach.
CNET senior editor and columnist Eliot Van Buskirk is the author of the Internet-audio bible "Burning Down the House: Ripping, Recording, Remixing and More!" (Osborne/McGraw-Hill).
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