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Music for an electronic generation
A.
Read the text and then try to answer the questions below.
MP3
technology has revolutionized the music industry. It's a standard
format that compresses audio files enabling you to transmit them
over the Net much more easily. This also makes them easier to download,
attach to an email or store on disk. It means you can listen to
music at high-quality sound for little or no cost.
A couple
of ways in which you might use MP3 files are:
- to
expand and play MP3 music files. To do this you need an MP3 player,
which you can download from the Internet. Two popular choices
are Winamp (from Nullsoft)
and RealJukebox (from RealNetworks).
They support streaming MP3 music, which lets you play a file while
it’s downloading
- to
create your own MP3 files from your CDs. You can do this using
a CD ripper, a program that extracts music tracks and saves them
on disk. Then using an encoder they’re converted into the MP3
format. A program like MusicMatch
has all that you need to turn CD tracks straight into MP3 song
files.
To
find MP3 music titles on the Web you need an MP3 search engine,
or you can visit music portal sites like MP3.com
and Emusic.com.
There
are, of course, minimum specifications for this software. You’ll
need at least a Pentium or PowerPC, 64 MB of RAM, a 10-bit sound
card, and stereo speakers. A portable MP3 player lets you listen
to MP3 files anywhere. For example, Diamond’s Rio portable player
allows you to transfer MP3 music from your PC to its built-in RAM
through your PC’s parallel port. It looks like a little personal
stereo and runs on batteries. There are also MP3 portable players
for the car.
There
is, however, a growing problem with MP3 music files as a lot of
them are pirated and offered free on illegal websites. Big record
companies stand to lose millions of dollars as music is transmitted
free of charge provoking a fierce reaction from them. Now, the Recording
Industry Association of America has decided to create a new compression
standard called SDMI (Secure Digital Music Initiative) to protect
digital music from piracy.
Glossary
MPEG: a popular file format for audio
and video compression developed by the Moving Picture Experts Group
How much did you understand? Now try these questions.
B.
Match each word on the left with its partner to make a common technical
term.
C.
Which verbs on the left are frequently found with nouns on the right?
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