Download free mp3 music rock

Music minus stores

Let's say you want a recording of Beatles hits or rocker Fiona Apple's latest music. The traditional thing to do would be to visit a record store and pay $12 for a CD. My, how quaint! Web-savvy music lovers don't bother shopping. They poke around the Internet, find songs they love on fan sites or trading posts, then use new gadgets to snatch the music. Often, they don't pay a dime. The music industry won't tolerate this violation of copyright laws forever, but the newfangled way of getting music--"digital distribution" is the buzz phrase--is clearly a keeper.

There are two main ways to import music from the Web: "Burn" the CDs yourself or harness the power of a pocket-size gadget called the Rio. Purchasing a CD of songs selected from a custom CD Web site's library is similar but not quite the same. You're not really making the CD yourself; you're mail-ordering it.

Many people burn CDs on a recordable CD-ROM drive, used with a PC. A few years back, the drives cost thousands. Now Hewlett-Packard and Sony sell recordable drives from $300 to $500. The drives, and the software packaged with them, are designed mainly to store computer data on a CD but can also record music. Recording software like Adaptec's Easy CD Creator Deluxe ($99), which copies audio files from a PC hard drive to a blank compact disk, is friendlier to the user. The music comes from Web sites like goodnoise.com or from existing CDs. The process is more complex than dubbing a cassette tape; you have to install and learn software and juggle memory space. But anyone with some PC know-how can do it. Recordable disks go for a few dollars apiece in bulk at online outlets, up to $15 each in computer stores.

Luddites aren't out of the loop. With a stand-alone stereo component--Philips's Dual-Deck Audio CD-Recorder CDR 765 ($649) is one of the best--you have a simpler option. The CDR 765's design resembles dual-cassette recording machines. Place a music CD in one tray, a blank disk in the other, and press "record." No pulling tunes from the Internet, though.

Or you could skip CDs altogether. Released in November, Diamond Multimedia's Rio PMP300 ($199) is as compact as a deck of cards but will have a titanic impact on the music market. Without lugging around a laptop or burning your own CD, you can capture music from the Internet to play wherever you go. Download Internet music to your PC, plug the Rio into the computer, run the Rio's program, and transfer the songs into the gizmo. The Rio plays MP3 audio files, a music format popular on the Internet. An MP3 file compresses the digital data on a music compact disk into a file as small as of its original size--much more convenient to store on a PC hard drive than the memory-intensive files on a regular music CD. The down side is that the sound is flattened a bit.

No warbling. The Rio can grab about an hour of music--30 minutes more if the device's built-in 32-megabyte memory is boosted with an optional $50 16MB flash card. You record over the music to add new songs but can keep original MP3 files on your PC. The Rio uses the same headphones as a portable cassette player, gets several hours of play off a single AA battery, and, because it stores music on computer chips, it doesn't skip or warble as you walk.

The best music for the Rio might be free. While just over half a dozen Web sites let you pay for and download MP3 music for about $1 per song or $10 an album, more than 200,000 illegally encoded MP3 songs reside on the Internet, according to Mark Hardie, a senior analyst at Forrester Research, a firm that studies technology. There's nothing to keep someone with MP3 software from taking an audio CD, compressing the songs into MP3 format, then posting the music on the Internet. Many netizens--especially college students with access to lots of memory and bandwidth on school servers--have done just that. Other rogues type "MP3" into a search engine to find, and then download, the illicit music. To the recording industry's dismay, the Rio can easily filch these bootleg tunes. The Rio has "shown the industry that technology will march forward without [it]," Hardie says.

Putting an MP3 copy of a hit song on the Internet or giving away or selling CD copies burned on a CD-R drive is illegal without the artist and record label's OK--as is downloading tunes from these sites or buying CD copies made from the sites. In the past year, the Recording Industry Association of America, the trade group for major record labels, has sued five Web sites for illegally posting music. Home-copied music generally doesn't draw a lawyer's wrath unless it's done for profit or the copier hands out freebies in bulk.

Shake your bootleg. The recording industry aims to quash Web piracy. In December, the RIAA began seeking a format that offers more security against digital copying, possibly a "watermark" so copies can be traced to their source. RIAA expects to conclude that search this fall but is unsure when any format would go into use. Artists, meanwhile, have mixed feelings about bootleg Web music. "Sometimes it takes pirates to reinvigorate the market," says folk rocker Dar Williams, who has invited fans to pick old songs for her to record on her Web site (darwilliams.com). "But this could really disrupt my income as an artist."

Some record labels, particularly small players, are plunging ahead with Web music, using their own encryption measures to prevent illegal copying. Twin/Tone Records cofounder Paul Stark, who has been offering music from Minneapolis alternative-rock bands for 20 years, stopped making compact disks in May. "Selling CDs is inefficient and doesn't work on the independent level," says Stark, who records 140 bands, including artists who have gone on to large-scale success like Soul Asylum and the Replacements. "Selling music digitally evens the playing field. It cuts out all the hype and marketing."

Twin/Tone will keep selling back-catalog CDs but will sell new music only digitally at twintone.com. The label's bands are encouraged to burn their own CDs to sell on tour. "Our bands will record new music whenever they feel like it and get it right to the fans," Stark says. That may be appealing to both obscure and famous musicians. The Beastie Boys, renowned rapping rockers, posted live recordings from their last tour at beastieboys.com. This freedom could lead to some pretty awful music. Then again, there's always the next song.

New music glossary These are some of the terms you'll hear when the topic of conversation turns to downloading music files from the Internet or copying CDs.

MP3. A data format that compresses multimedia files with minimal damage to their fidelity. That makes downloading of music files from the Internet much faster and economizes on the hard-drive space needed to store them.

Rip. To convert music tracks on a CD into an MP3 file.

CD-R. Recordable compact disk. A blank CD with limits: Once you've recorded something, you can't record over it. CD-R disks can be played on most recent CD players.

CD-RW. Rewritable compact disk. It's like a CD-R, but you can record over old tracks. CD-RW disks can only be played on recordable-CD players.

Burn. To record a CD.