Warning: Undefined array key 0 in /home/digitald/public_html/courses/wp-content/plugins/radgeek-FWP---Add-Attribution-70acf52/add-attribution-feedwordpress.php on line 363
In his article “The MP3 as Cultural Artifact”, Jonathan Sterne mentions a few things that resonate with me regarding MP3 files. When I got my first MP3 player as a kid, I remember using Napster on my home computer to transfer music onto the media player. My dad had gotten an MP3 player before me, so he was familiar with Napster and taught me how to use it. At the time, I really understood nothing about what I was doing outside of downloading MP3 files onto my MP3 player.
Fast-forwarding to high school, I had upgraded from my MP3 player to a new iPod touch. As I built my Apple iTunes library, I started to realize how expensive it was to buy music song-by-song. I waited patiently for birthdays and Christmas to ask for iTunes gift cards. Finally, though, a friend of mine showed me a new way to download music into my iTunes library: YouTube to MP3 converters.
While I could not find the exact one that I used to use, there now exist a ton of different sites that convert YouTube videos to MP3 formatted files and place them in an iTunes library. This discovery was critical for me. The process was certainly more time consuming, but it was free, and I now had access to any sound files, not just ones on the iTunes store. I could download as much music from YoutTube as I wanted. Before reading Sterne’s article, I had never realized that the nature of MP3 files themselves made this transfer process possible.
To this day, even though I now have Spotify premium, I will occasionally still use these converters to put songs into my Spotify account that do not exist on Spotify. I have the Motion Picture Experts Group to thank for this ability.
Posted from Digital Studies 101 Blog by Patrick G.