The All Purpose How I Do This Which Could Mean iTunes Thread

My wife has this party music set of tapes from her high school daze, circa 1988. The tapes have gone bad and I want to recreate them on CDR which she could play in her CD player in her car.

The tapes have the artists and titles scribbled on them, so at least I don't have to figure those out.

What I want to do is d/l the songs and burn them as wav files onto a CDR. My P2P days stopped a few years back and all I got now is an ancient version of Kazaa Lite, which the last time I checked was losing popularity fast. If I can find the MP3s on Kazaa Lite or similar P2P, I would then be concerned about quality/density since 128 is the going the rate.

My discovery of the Usenet music binary groups put an end to my P2P days. Most every thing that I want passes through those groups eventually. And the Usenet MP3s are CD or near CD quality, 256+.

I am thinking that I could find the 100 or so songs I want on Kazaa eventually, but the music quality will be lacking. I am thinking that I might be able to find a handful of the songs I am looking for on Usenet, all with great quality. Either option appears to leave me short of my goal.

Enter iTunes. I don't know much about iTunes. Can you burn them as wavs to a CDR which will play in any music CD player? Is their selection of 15 year old, back catalog CDs there yet? Are the iTunes as fat as wavs? Would 90 minutes of iTunes fit on one CDR?

 

I am using RR's news feed which if I am lucky has a 2 day retention period. I am seriously thinking about switching to Earth Link in hopes a 7 day retention period. Back before my broadband days iirc, both Netcom and EV1 both had at least 7 day retention periods. Ah the good ol', bad ol' days.

 

Usenet is "old school" forums. All the messages added to a particular newsgroup look like an email message. A news group reader just reads the email messages in the Usenet group you select. Actually there is a "rec.sports.basketball.pro.houston.rockets" (or some such) Usenet news group where you can find people discussing our favorite topic.

At some point binaries started to get posted to Usenet newsgroups. The binaries say for a MP3 would make up like 20-40 separate messages, with each message header containing the phrase "Part 1 of 18" or some such. Some news group readers are now smart enough to group multi-part into a single email with a single attachment. Downloading that attachment to your hard drive would bring the MP3 home

When you signed up with your ISP, they most likely gave you a URL for the news server along with the URLs for the inbound & outbound email servers.

 

A good, free new reader is Free Agent by Forte. After you install FA, you will get the multi-attachment as one message capability for free. Aftr the 30 days, you will have to search out the license key

The alt.binaries.sound.mp3.* news groups are a good place to start. Searching your list of news group titles for "mp3" is also a very Good Thing (tm).