Amazon.com Review
Napster's in the news, that's for sure, which means that more people are listening to music encoded in the Motion Picture Experts Group 3 (MPEG-3, or MP3) standard.
MP3! I Didn't Know You Could Do That... exists for the purpose of explaining what MP3 music is, why it's superior to older music formats in many ways, and how you can listen to and record it. Readers get the goods on finding, downloading, recording, sharing, and modifying MP3 files--in short, how to participate in the MP3 community. It's both an instruction manual and a toolkit, as its companion CD-ROM includes Winamp, Sonique, MusicMatch JukeBox, and a selection of public-domain MP3 files.
The book gets a bit tedious at times, particularly when it "explains" how to do things on the Web that are both pretty intuitive to begin with and adequately documented online. The authors otherwise do a good job, however, in pointing out software whose existence might not be apparent to an MP3 newcomer, and illuminating the process of recording MP3 files onto CD-ROM disks in CD-DA format for use in a standard CD player. Their coverage also excels when it comes to Napster, as they include mentions of Macster (for the Mac OS) and Gnapster (for the Gnome environment under Linux), as well as the popular Windows edition of the MP3-exchange tool. --David Wall
Topics covered: MP3 audio files, along with the tools and communities that have sprung into existence around them. Documentation of popular MP3 software, like Winamp and Napster, is a big part of this book, and a guide to MP3 download sites makes up much of the rest. There's coverage of recording MP3 files onto standard audio disks, too.
