MP3 Cafe

To install a skin onto your Winamp, simply download a skin, uncompress it into the SKINS directory in your WINAMP directory. The skins have different directories for each skin. After you moves the skin directory, run Winamp, go to the options menu and choose “Skin Browser”. You will get a list of available skins, where you choose your skin, double click on the skin to choose it. That’s it.
To install a plugin onto your Winamp, download it first. Uncompress it into the PLUGINS directory inside your WINAMP directory (much like the skin). Then go to the preferences menu in your Winamp, and go to the Visualization folder if it’s a visual plug-in, or to the “MISC PLUG-INS” folder if it’s a misc plugin. In these folders you will see the available plugins in your PLUGINS directory. Simply choose the plugin you want. To get to the Visualization folder press CTRL+K, and to activate/deactivate the chosen plugin, press SHIFT+CTRL+K.

Usually the MP3 player come in some way, with some nice graphics, and a nice interface, but in time you might get bored looking at the same window, and you might want a change. That’s how Skins, and Plugins came to the world. Instead of seeing the usual textures, and the same VU meter which is running constantly, you can change the entire look of the player, and add plugins which make the MP3 reading much for alive and colorful. There are some MP3 players which support different skins and textures, and of course - plugins, such as Winamp which supports both. Although the main window stays the same and doesn’t change the interface, it has some great skins for both player, playlist, and even equalizer. Furthermore, there are many plugins which show the VU meter and all sorts of ways to display the sound waves - a real cool thing.

MP3s are very restricted when it comes to dealing with them. There is not much you can do with it since it’s encoded. Although it’s great and takes up a lot less space then the regular WAV files, you might want to change it or edit it, and for that you will need a decoder. With this decoder you can convert the MP3 back to it’s origin. To do this you need a decoder program (some come in with an encoder). After decoded you can use it as plain WAV file. There are many uses to decoding MP3s, such as editing it, altering and changing the songs themselves, and if you want to burn them on a CD, you can only burn them as tracks from WAV files.

After you’ve ripped the track you wish to convert to MP3 the file you have in WAV format, which takes up a lot of space. To convert the WAV to MP3 you have to encode it, as MP3 are encoded sound files. To do so, you need (yes, you guessed) an encoder program. Encoding is the last process in making your own MP3s, after that… all you have left to do is enjoy the music

CD-Ripping is a process where you copy tracks directly from a CD and convert them to readable WAV files (or some other un-encoded format). You actually “rip” the CD’s tracks, and put them on disk.
To “rip” tracks from a CD you will need a program which does so. The Ripping process doesn’t actually rips tracks in MP3 format since MP3s are encoded, and to convert them to MP3 you need an encoder. Some examples of CD-Rippers are : WinDAC, CDDA and many more.

Here’s what you do if you want to install an MP3 player. I’m taking as an example the famous program Winamp. First download the install file either from us or from their homepage. Afterwards, you run the self extracting EXE by double clicking on it (you might need Winzip to open the file). Choose a directory to install and click Unzip. After it extracts all the files the program will take you to the Winamp splash screen and will play a sample song. Click OK and you’ll enter the configuration, where you can modify, add and change the settings of Winamp. To play a song, download it (make sure it ends with .MP3 or the site specifies that you must rename it to .MP3), and put it in a directory. Go to Winamp and press the open file button which is the one with the up arrow on it. Choose the directory where you put the MP3 file and double click on the song. You can also make a list of songs by pressing the PL button, there you can add, subtract and sort the songs of your choice.

MP3 players are just what they sound like, programs which simply take MP3 files as they are encoded and play them directly. As you know MP3s are unlike WAV files, as they are encoded, that’s why a simple WAV player can’t play MP3s. That’s why we have MP3 players alone, such as Winamp, Music Matchbox, Wplay, and much more… They all share the same goal - playing the MP3s at great quality and speed. The configurability, options, and interfaces vary from each other, and some play WAV and MID sound file types.

MPEG Layer-3 or better known as MP3 is an advanced audio coding schemes that has been mainly developed by the Audio and Multimedia department of Fraunhofer IIS from Germany. It offers the advantage of playing audio files at the original sound quality at a data reduction up to 12 times of the source file.
The MP3 Surround format offers multi-channel sound while being fully backwards compatible with existing MP3 decoders in the sense that these will decode a stereo downmix of the multichannel sound image. Yet, the data rate required is comparable to conventional stereo MP3.