Visit any electronics store, and you won’t have to look far to find the department where portable music players are sold. From inexpensive players that double as a memory stick for your PC through to shiny Apple iPods that cost hundreds of dollars, there’s a portable player that hits every price point and every feature request.

Know what they all have in common?

You’d be right if you guessed they ALL play MP3 files.

An MP3 is a file that can be copied, deleted, moved and renamed just like any other file on your PC. But it’s a format that’s exclusively used for audio content, and it’s the out-and-out leader, everywhere in the world, of all other audio file formats. MP3 first, daylight second.

This blog is all about MP3s. I’ll tell you what they are, how to get them, how to organize your MP3 collection on or off your PC, how to play them (wherever you are), and how to archive them for safe keeping and future enjoyment.

MP3 files will be with us for many, many years. There’s a huge volume of material, both legal and illegal, that use the MP3 format, and every portable player supports it. Equally important is the number of software tools to rip CDs to MP3 files, to correctly tag and organize MP3 collections, and to play MP3 files on just about every hifi system, from low-end micro systems to network-aware jukebox systems.

My plan over the next few months is to post in these broad topic areas:

The MP3 Format

I want to cover some background information about the MP3 file format, including a very brief history and some good detail about quality and digital rights management (DRM). I’ll also talk about the alternatives to MP3 - what they are, why they’re better (or worse), when you’d bother to use them, and where you get them from.

Sources of MP3 Files

Where do MP3 files come from? I’ll touch on the legal and illegal sources of MP3 files (note - I am not a lawyer), and the benefits and drawbacks of each. You’ll get good information about how to get the content you want, at the price you want to pay, and the risk you want to bear.

Organizing Your MP3 Collection

It won’t take long for your collection to grow out of control (and that’s a big understatement). I’ll go over details about keeping your MP3 collection correctly tagged and named so you can always find and play exactly what you want… even if your collection is hundreds of gigabytes and thousands of CDs in size.

Playing Your MP3s

It’s not much fun having to sit at your PC to enjoy that massive collection you’ve built. I’ll show you how to burn custom CDs and DVDs to take your music anywhere you want, how to use and organize your music on portable MP3 players, and how to connect your home stereo so you can stream music all over the house.

Archiving Your Collection (and any other digital data you value)

Before long you’ll need to think real hard about how to protect your collection against hard disk failure, theft and honest accidents (like erasure). There’s some really good tools to safely archive your collection to DVDs in a way that pretty much guarantees readability decades from now.

The Toolbox

Throughout this blog you’ll see references to software that makes the MP3 experience a whole lot easier. Some is freeware, and some is commercial software. Links and descriptions will gathered together in this section for easy reference, and there’s a link at the top of every page so you can find it fast.

Glossary of MP3 Terms

Confused about an MP3 term or acronym? I’ll put up a section, also accessible at the top of every page, that pulls them together for convenience and reference.

So that’s the plan. These posts will be forming the guts of an eBook - read about that project here - and I’ve put together a sweet offer that I hope you check out.