Do-it-yourself high quality CDs

For more than a decade, the music-loving public has been given a choice between quality and control. Consumers could buy their music on high-quality digital compact discs, and be forced to listen to music the way the record studio intended, or you could create your own cassette tape with the tunes that you wanted, and be forced to put up with the inferior analog sound quality.

Well, times have changed, and today audiophiles can have it all. Advancements in digital home recording let you have quality and control, albeit, for a price.

One of the easiest ways to get into digital home recording is with a Sony Mini Disc recorder. Mini Discs, or MDs, are like traditional compact discs, but with three important differences. First, MDs are roughly half the size of CDs. Next is the protective case: unlike CDs, you never actually touch the Mini Disc. And finally, MDs are recordable.

Each Mini Disc holds 74 minutes of music. Although you can buy pre-recorded MDs, most people are using them to record music from CDs or live events. To record, you'll need an MD recorder, which costs anywhere from $350 to $700. I bought the Sony MZ-R50 ($399), which fits in my pocket and can record up to 4.5 hours on a single battery charge. Sony also makes the MDS-S39 ($300), a desktop system that can accept digital input from CD players that have optical output.

You can use the recorder to play it back or you can buy an MD player, which typically costs $100 less. These pocket players are made both by Sony and Sharp. Compared with portable CD players, the MD players can run longer on a pair of batteries and are less sensitive to bumps and jitter.

Mini Disc recorders are quickly becoming the standard for professional audio recorders, replacing Digital Audio Tape systems that are more expensive and harder to use. Besides doing a great job on music, MD does an excellent job reproducing interviews and lectures: The extra fidelity makes it much easier to understand what's being said, especially when you use a high-quality stereo microphone.

Another way to record your own digital music is to use your home computer and a Compact Disc Recorder (CD-R), a special CD-ROM drive that can both play standard CDs and record onto special blank CD-R media. A typical CD-R drive costs anywhere from $200 to $500. You can buy blank CD-R media for 79 cents a disc if you buy a 10-pack and take advantage of the manufacturer's $20/pack rebate.

You can use a CD-R drive for copying audio CDs, CD-ROMs, and even video games that use CD-ROMs. When you copy music, you have the choice of making a faithful recording of the disc, rearranging the tracks, or grabbing some tracks from one disc, some tracks from another, and making your own masterpiece.

The music industry is really of two minds about CD-R. Local rock bands and small record producers see CD-R as an easy way of making single discs. Instead of sending tapes, many groups seeking fame now send their own CDs. But many music publishers see CD-R as a huge copyright violation system -- the ideal tool to let pirates bootleg perfect copies of popular music.

These fears seem all the more justified by the growing number of pirate music sites on the Internet, which let people download all of the songs they want for free, provided they upload a few other songs in return.

But CD-R is likely to open new business opportunities as well. For example, there is now a company in Connecticut that will let you pick out the songs you want on the Internet, burn them onto a CD-R for you, and then send you the disc. But it's not piracy. That's because Custom Disc (www.customdisc.com), charges the consumer for each disc and uses this money to pay for the appropriate copyright licensing fees, the production costs, and shipping, with enough left over for a small profit.

If you are going to get into the CD-R burning business, here are a few words of advice. CD-R drives that use the SCSI interface seem to work better than those that use the IDE interface.

Unfortunately, these drives cost more and require that you buy an additional SCSI interface card. Secondly, people using Windows NT or UNIX seem to have better luck than those using Windows 95, because the operating systems are better suited to the task. I haven't heard anything from people who burn CD-Rs with Macintosh computers.

Yet another way to take control of your music is by using the MP3 sound compression system. With MP3, you can take a song and crunch it down to a few megabytes of data. With MP3, you can store an entire album in 30 megabytes of space -- or put a 200 CD collection onto a 6 gigabyte hard drive with plenty of room to spare.

Boosters of MP3 say that the system is CD-quality. In my testing, it isn't. Music that was compressed with MP3 lacked the richness and depth of music directly off the audio CD. But unless you do a side-by-side comparison, it's pretty easy to put up with the inferior quality.

As with CD-R, the music industry is of two-minds with MP3. Already, some garage bands have started selling "singles" of their music on floppy disks, playable on any PC with a freely available MP3 player. Other bands are putting their music on the Internet, letting anybody who wants to download it for free. And another Web site, www.mp3.com, actually lets you buy hits online and download them over a modem.

A typical song "Fanfare; You Know It" by Tower of Power, is priced at just 65 cents. The MP3 Web site also has plenty of free music for download as well.

Unfortunately, there's also a growing number of pirate MP3 Web sites on the Net as well. Those sites are letting the music publishing industry claim that the primary purpose of MP3 is copyright violation. And the industry has used this argument to threaten software and hardware producers.

To play an MP3 song, you'll need a PC and an MP3 player. There are lots of free players; you can download them from MP3.COM as well. Winamp is the most popular MP3 player; it allows you to change the look by loading "skins," many of which area available for free on the Internet. My favorite player, though, is Sonique, which has better graphics and a more intuitive user interface.

Another way to get MP3s is to make your own. MusicMatch is a program that combines an MP3 player with a recorder. Run MusicMatch and put an audio CD into your computer's CD-ROM drive. MusicMatch will then take each track from the CD and compress it using the MP3 technology.

You can download MusicMatch from www.musicmatch.com. The player is free, but the MP3 encoder costs $29.95. You can even combine MP3 and CD-R technology and make a single CD-ROM with more than 10 hours of music. Although you'll need a computer to play it back, computers are getting smaller and cheaper all the time. In the future, it's likely that all of our music will be both compressed and digitized. Now that's entertainment!