Creating your own database of MP3 files is pretty easy. Many software packages allow you to rip and encode your CDs. Whoa! Nobody wants to "rip" or destroy precious CDs. Don’t worry, ripping and encoding are simply fancy terms for what most of us call "recording".

Ripping is the process of taking audio data from your CD and making it into a sound file on your computer. It is called ripping because in most cases the audio data is digitally "ripped" directly from the CD. This process can be very fast (a 4:00 song might only take 0:30 to record). An analog recording process on the other hand records a song by playing the CD and recording the sound output. The analog process can only happen in real time (a 4:00 song takes 4:00 minutes to record). The digital extraction process is faster because it copies the data instead of recording the sound output. The speed of the ripping process depends on your CD-ROM. Most new CD-ROMs support some form of digital audio extraction. Some older models, however, will only work with analog recording. The speed is slower because the songs from your CD must be played and recorded just as they would if you were recording to a cassette. Analog extraction, though slower, will produce the same output... a digital audio file on your computer (usually in the WAV format). Typically, the audio file that is created is very large (although some encoders skip this intermediate step and rip and encode at the same time).

As we discussed before, these large audio files can be compressed into smaller files (without losing sound quality) using an encoder. Encoding is simply the process of reading the audio data from our large sound file, discarding the parts that we don’t hear, and creating a much smaller, great sounding, compressed digital audio file (MP3). The speed of the encoding process is mostly dependent on the speed of your computer’s processor.

This is all well and good if you want to record only from your CDs. What if you want to grab songs from your dusty vinyl or tape collections? Several software packages offer "line-in" recording. You may have even received some with your sound card. Basically, these software applications follow the same principles as the analog recording methods that are used with older CD-ROM drives. The sound output from your turntable or cassette player (or microphone or 8-track) is routed through your sound card and recorded onto your computer (usually in the WAV format). You can then encode this file to create an MP3 file.

With the right software, some of which is available absolutely free on the Internet, anyone with a CD-ROM drive in his computer can amass a large database of MP3 files from his CD (or LP and tape) collection.

"But", you might say, "when I listen to my stereo, I usually listen to the radio. Maybe this MP3 thing isn’t for me." Hold on. Our next section tells you all about Internet Radio.