Playing Hard to Get
MP3s are an easy catch – if you're not picky
Musically, I've
always been a few beats short of hip. While my friends latched on to New
Wave in the early '80s, I crowed about my Led Zeppelin LP with the
rotating cover art. In college everyone switched to CDs; I kept buying
cassettes. In grad school I discovered 10,000 Maniacs -- just when Natalie
Merchant ditched the band. And while I've heard all about music on the Net
-- digitized songs called MP3s that you can grab out of cyberspace and
keep handy on your hard drive -- I never bothered with it. For me, turning
a PC into a musical-entertainment system meant sliding an Abba disc into
the cd-rom drive for a little Mama Mia with e-mail.
But then I decided it was time to catch up. MP3s aren't just for tech
savants in dorm rooms anymore -- from what I've read, it's easy enough for
even casual Web surfers. I gave it a try.
First I had to make sure my PC was equipped to download and play
MP3s. Sound card? Check. Speakers? Check. At least a 100-megahertz Pentium
processor? My two-year-old Dell has a 200-MHz Pentium II. But I wasn't
fully rigged yet. I needed a software player that would run on my machine.
I looked up my options at mp3.com (a good
first stop) and chose MusicMatch
Jukebox, an all-in-one set of
applications that would come in handy later. The 4-MB file took 22 minutes
to download. (My dial-up link was running at 26.4 kbps; if I had been
doing this at work with the T1 line in my office, it would've been a lot
faster.) I installed it and clicked "yes" to designate it as my default
audio player.
I launched the program, pulled down the "Sites" menu and hit the MP3
search button. That launched my Web browser and took me to scour.net, where I specified that I wanted
downloadable music and typed in "Lenny Kravitz." Up came 365 matches.
Bingo -- or so I thought. Scrolling through, I saw no Let Love Rule, no
Fields of Joy. No Kravitz! The list was of a bunch of songs by bands I had
never heard of. (Diner Junkies?)
