How Does It Work?
You don't have to be a computer
wizard to enjoy online music, though it helps to know a
little about how it all works.
It's all down to 'packets', chunks of digital data flying around the Internet.
Until recently data packets were mostly used to convey email messages and web pages but back in the early 1990s Internet boffins perfected various ways to chop up musical sounds and turn them into digital data, to send over the Internet.
MP3 was one of the first of these digital data formats for music and is still one of the most successful.
MP3 is short for Motion Picture Experts Group, Layer 3; that's techno-speak for a compression system or audio 'Codec' (coder-decoder).
Long story short; MP3 and the other widely-used commercial codecs (AAC, ATRAC and WMA - more about those shortly), make it quicker and easier to send large volumes of audio data over the Internet, making files smaller by cutting out redundant information and sounds you can't hear.
MP3 took off in a big way and downloading music onto home computers became hugely popular with computer geeks, but it was the development of portable MP3 players and broadband Internet services that tamed the technology and really got things moving.
MP3 players, and more recently portable devices like the ubiquitous iPod, allow you to store music files on memory chips, removable cards or miniature hard disc drives.
| Play Legal Quotes |
Emma Pike,
Chief Executive "... And more importantly, that this money is, in part, being paid back to the creators at the heart of that music, thus enabling them to continue to create. " |
As the technology has developed, the storage capacity of personal players has reached the point where some models can hold more than 10,000 tracks.
But you don't need one of these players to benefit from online music; most recent models of home computers and laptops have a CD writer built-in, enabling users to download and compile their favourite tracks and then copy or 'burn' them to disc (rules on doing this legally to follow!).
But where does all this music come from? In the early days individuals and groups of enthusiasts set up online music libraries copied or 'ripped' from commercially recorded CDs.
At first, these tended to be relatively small-scale affairs but as demand grew, 'download' sites started to collapse under the strain and this led to the development of peer-to-peer (P2P) or 'file sharing' networks.
It is an elegantly simple idea; instead of large music libraries on a central computer or 'server', music tracks are stored on thousands (and eventually millions) of home computers, who we will call file sharers
Files were shared among groups of PC owners with specially written programs cataloguing, searching for and downloading tracks from other file sharer's computers.
Ashe craze for music downloading grew, it started to attract the interest of the record companies.
They became increasingly alarmed by the fact that most online music being shared in this way was effectively stolen or 'pirated', and something had to be done about it.
© Rick Maybury