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When you speak with friends and they tell stories of the gigabytes of song titles they have stored up, it really makes you wonder where they get these huge collections of songs. The fastest way to add large numbers of songs to your collections is by "ripping" or making a digital computer copy of your CD collection. Most of the larger applications, like Winamp, once the dominant digital music playing software and iTunes will let you rip a CD easily. They can connect to the Internet and match up the CD to a central database to automatically include the song titles and artist details encoded with each song automatically, called ID3 tags, and will store all the songs in the same folder on your hard drive. With your average CD holding 12 tracks, you can quickly increase your own catalogue of music by ripping your favourite CDs, or even just your favourite tracks. As long as you own the CDs, you can rip them for your own use without any concern, letting you bring your entire music collection with you.
Looking online, the best way to legitimately download songs off the Internet is by purchasing them through various online music stores. Some of the most popular choices are iTunes, MusicMatch and Napster, which operate similarly: download a software application to your computer, securely enter your credit card number for billing of your selections, and then search and download your musical choices, with billing happening a few days later and grouping recent purchases under one collective charge. With preview functions to hear a sample of your choices before buying, and extensive inventories (often approaching a million song titles or more), it makes legitimate song downloads a real option, especially when considering that you can pick and choose the exact songs you like at prices around a dollar per track and with larger discounts for large albums of songs.
The downloading of other MP3s off the Internet, outside of legitimate online stores, is dubious and open to copyright violation - in some countries, for example, Canada, it is legal to download copywritten material but illegal to upload it in the first place; in other countries, like the US, it is illegal to either download or upload. Various court cases will inevitably settle this on a country-by-country basis, and eventually will settle upon a "world opinion" on the matter.
Another option, since ripping a CD onto your computer can be so easy, is a little more advanced. Most sound cards have a line-in jack, allowing any external source that can output via a 1/8" headphone jack to be recorded on your computer - this can include keyboards, multi-track mixing boards, minidisk players, an external microphone, or the headphone or line output of a separate stereo. This means that anything you hear can be recorded, which makes it possible to digitally archive older analog recordings, and can also allow any garage band to become a 'Net sensation with their own MP3s.
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