The mood among campus file-swappers - students are growing increasingly perturbed

Just about every PC sold these days contains a CD burner with a simple CD burning program as part of the original software. There are more advanced CD burning programs (such as Roxio EasyCD Creator) but it sounds like you want to keep it simple. In which case, the program that comes with the PC should be fine.

If you don't want to spring for a new PC, then you can upgrade the system you have. You can buy CD-writers for pretty cheap these days. Realize that any CD-writer also functions as a regular CD drive. So you can just replace the CD drive you already have with the CD-writer (in case you don't have an extra bay). Then buy one of the more basic CD-burning programs (about $30).

Once you are set up, you should then "rip" all the CD's you own into MP3s. It's not complicated. You just put your CD into the drive and open your CD-burning program. It should be pretty easy to figure out how to convert the songs on your CD to MP3s that will be stored on your hard drive. Choose the 160kbps bitrate for your MP3s as those sound very good and don't hog up a lot of your hard drive. (128kbps yield inferior sound quality in my opinion.)

When downloading MP3s off the web, avoid the "subscription" services out there as they place restrictions on the music you download. For example, many of them cannot be burned onto a CD. Unfortunately, the legal services (for PC) that allow you to do whatever you want with their music files do not have content from the major record labels. So no Fleetwood Mac, Beatles, Bruce Springsteen or anybody who has made it big. Just independent label music. Not that all of it is bad, but you will just not find your favorite music.

Unfortunately, (as a PC user), your only option is to use the "illicit" file-sharing services like Kazaa and Grokster if you want to get major label music. Unless you want to buy an Apple and get the iTunes service (which is quite good, I hear.)

I'm sure there will be legal major label music available for the PC world soon that allows you to "own" outright the music you download. But it just hasn't happened yet.

No, it's not theft. We've driven this issue into the ground on other related threads. Theft involves stealing a THING. What you're doing here is illegally COPYING something and then downloading that, which is substantially different than stealing a Maserati (sp) or even a ten-cent piece of bubblegum. Again, the only way this is unjustifiable morally is if you don't go out and buy the CD when you download (and keep!) something. Downloading MP3s is not any different than recording something off of the radio or off of your TV with all those free music channels. It's funny to watch the industry freak out when all of a sudden they have 10,000 DJS (because that's basically what P2P hosts are) playing their music and they don't have them under their corporate thumbs anymore. What's going to happen is that the big-name labels will either evolve or die. The bands will turn to self-promotion and touring and mp3.com and so forth. In any case, the free market will reign and the copyright laws will change, eventually.

Of course, I don't want to encourage you to do anything illegal. But you will be surprised at the amount of independent, non-copyrighted material that is out there.

I've found the swapper services most useful for getting stuff that's out of print or was never released on CD in the first place. It's pretty obnoxious for the RIAA et al to say you can't download/copy something because they own the rights to it...and then refuse to sell you a copy.

-Eric

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