I can’t say enough good things about CD Baby. For $35, they sell your album in CD and mp3 formats on their site. More importantly, they’ll place your music on all the major download sites, including the #1 music retailer, iTunes. //

Even if you don’t deal directly with Amazon, you’ll still have a presence there through CD Baby. They’ll place your album for sale as a digital download for $8.99. That’s probably good enough for most independent artists.

How to Add Bookmarks?

Step 1. Input an Audio File
Step 2. Add Bookmarks
Step 3. Mark the Region

Introduction

If you listen to audio books, radio shows, extended DJ mixes, or other long audio files on your MP3 player, you would doubtlessly find it useful to be able to bookmark your location in a file, so that you can choose that bookmark later to start listening again from the same spot. Download and install MP3 Audio Editor first.

Every time you re-compress an MP3, some audio gets thrown away. I opened a FLAC file of this song in Adobe Audition, then saved it as a 128k MP3. I then opened the MP3 I just saved, and re-saved it as a 128k MP3 with a new filename. Repeated that process 300 times.

By the 5th generation, there are noticeable artifacts in the audio quality.

By the 10th generation, it sounds like crap. And the quality only gets worse. The audio sounds progressively worse the more times it's compressed.

It's like playing the game of "Telephone" in which a large group of people line up and the first person whispers something to the second person, who whispers it to the third person and so on. By the time the message gets to the last person, the meaning would have changed.

A similar process happens when an MP3 file gets compressed over and over. Each generation introduces new artifacts in the audio as the decoder imperfectly approximates what audio was thrown away. By the 300th generation, it's hard to understand the lyrics!

Audiograbber is a beautiful piece of software that grabs digital audio from cd's. Audiograbber can automatically normalize the music, delete silence from the start and/or end of tracks, and encode them to a variety of formats including MP3. Audiograbber can download and upload disc info from freedb, an Internet compact disc database. You can even record your vinyl LP's or cassette tapes with Audiograbber and make wav's or MP3's of them. There are a lot more functions in Audiograbber, but to put it simply: Audiograbber has the most features one can wish from such a program!

• Download Audiograbber 1.83 SE

• Download Audiograbber MP3-Plugin

  Significant advantages:

• A nice and easy understandable user interface.
• A good helpfile with descriptions of all functions and settings.
• The program is very flexible and configurable and still easy to understand.
• It works with almost all CD-ROM drives that can read digital audio.
• Last but not least: it is free!