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Cancel Cable: How Internet Pirates Get Free Stuff |
Chapter 13 – Music and Spoken Word
A sampling of audio files that you can download:
- Audio books, which can come as a single file, per-chapter files, or multiple equal-sized files that must be played gaplessly
- Classroom recordings, training courses, tutorials, and seminars
- Comedy shows
- Dance mixes
- Foreign-language instruction
- Historic speeches
- Literary and theatrical dramatizations
- Movie and musical soundtracks
- Music of every genre and venue from artists of every caliber, with downloads ranging from single pieces to discographies
- Podcasts and audio magazines
- Radio shows, news shows, and interviews
- Ringtones and computer system sounds
- Religious text readings
- Self-help and relaxation techniques
- Sound effects
Audio Formats
The most common audio format is MP3 (.mp3). An MP3 file’s bitrate largely determines its quality:
- The bitrate is between 32 kbps and 320 kbps (kilobits per second). Bitrates less than 128 kbps are low quality, akin to broadcast radio. 128–160 kbps is standard quality. 224–320 kbps is high quality, with 320 kbps sounding about the same as a CD.
- Better quality means larger files: the file size of a 3-minute MP3 is about 2.8 megabytes @ 128 kbps, 4.2 MB @ 192 kbps, and 7 MB @ 320 kbps.
- Expect diminishing returns: 128 kbps audio sounds hugely better than 64 kbps but only marginally worse than 256 kbps.
- For music, the torrent name, filenames, or release notes will sometimes give the bitrate; if not, you can view a file’s bitrate in its Properties or Info window (see Chapter 3). Bitrates matter less for spoken-word audio, which are typically single-channel (mono) recordings with little dynamic range.
Other audio formats include AAC (.aac, .m4a, .m4b, .m4p, .m4r), AIFF (.aif), FLAC (.flac), Musepack or MPC (.mpc), RealAudio (.ra), Vorbis (.oga, .ogg), WAV (.wav), WMA (.wma), and many more. These formats may have better sound-quality/file-size tradeoffs than MP3, meaning they sound better at the same bitrate, but none has MP3’s ubiquity. Every media player plays MP3s. Windows and OS X come with Windows Media Player and iTunes. Other popular media players include VLC media player 
and Winamp . I prefer the simplicity of Media Player Classic . See also Wikipedia’s list of media players . The hardware players listed in “Media Players” in Chapter 11 can play audio files on your TV. Some audio collections come with playlists, such as .m3u files, that you can open in your media player to play the accompanying audio files in a specific order.
If you download an audio file in an unfamiliar format, search fileinfo.com for the filename extension or read Wikipedia’s article about audio file formats . To associate a particular audio type with a specific program, see Chapter 3.