Customer Reviews

MP3 and the Digital Music Revolution

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This book has it all - excellent, clear writing, appropriate use of screenshots, graphics, and photographs, an excellent and thorough index, an excellent glossary, and a compendium of additional sources of information. The CD has a variety of MP3 related products as well as dozens of MP3 files. I knew virtually nothing about MP3 before I read this book, and now I'm "ripping" from my old vinyl albums and cassette tapes! I even created MP3 and WAV files from casette tape voice recordings. If you're not a professional musician or audio engineer, this book is probably all you'll need to understand and use MP3 technology.

This is a wonderful book for anyone who wants to delve into MP3 technology. I was actually most impressed by the index, which is detailed enough to allow you to answer any questions you may have without wasting time. Definitely worth the money!

This book is great for beginners who want to get started with MP3. It walks you through downloading and playing tons of music and includes a lot of software on the CD.

The CD has 11 hours of music of nearly all types with a lot of lively, upbeat stuff. As near as I can tell, most of it is new to MP3 format.

I had high hopes for this book but I was very disappointed. The information is much too basic and there'e not much "meat" for a 250 page book. There is surprisingly little information about MPEG audio for a book on MP3. Most of the book is useless "filler."

Some examples: The index is 13 pages of 4-column small type. It almost looks like every word related to any key term in the book was indexed. Words like "bio," "notes," and "mirrors" appear as subentries dozens of lines below the key word. There must be 2,500 plus entries-most useless- in the index. The back of the book is five pages of advertisements from various companies. It looks more like the yellow pages. The bulk of the book is taken up by tutorials for MusicMatch, leaving little room for anything else. Much of the remaining space is occupied by product photos and blurry screen shots.

Much of the information is incorrect or misleading. For example, the author refers to "ripping from tape," "ripping from radio" and "ripping your voice." It's bad enough that some software developers are using the phrase "analog ripping" to describe recording audio from a CD, but "ripping your voice?" The author also refers to WAV files as being uncompressed, which not always true.

I ordered the book three months ago and just now received it. I assumed that was because the author was taking more time to produce a decent book with up-to-date information. I made the wrong assumption. Maybe next time I'll wait for a book to ship and read some other peoples comments before purchasing it.

This book claims to be "a fast introduction to MP3", and it serves that purpose very well. Engineers looking for precise technical detail won't find it here, but anyone who's heard of MP3 and wants to know more about what it can do and how to use it will appreciate the book's clear, approachable text.

This book is great..if you read it up, you will find how you will never have to buy music ever again! Will pay for itself many times over!!

A wonderfully written book. I'm now suggesting it to all my friends. I am honestly say you have changeed our lives. wow... am I excited! thanks for such a great...great book. alexandra daniel, frankfurt, germany

This book has decent stuff in it, but it was hard to use. Like I wanted to use MusicMatch, and all the information is there, but its spread out all over the place, mixed in with information about other products. A lot of the book was on stuff like turning tapes into MP3 and doing weird things to MP3 files. Not much use to people who just want to listen to music on the PC.