The most amazing thing about making music on a computer is the miraculous transformation that takes you from being simply a musician to a seasoned producer, practiced engineer and shrewd manufacturer in as long as it takes to install the software. This, of course, is completely untrue. Having the tools available to you to produce fantastic music doesn’t mean that you will. A simple analogy would be that you could have the best, most advanced paint brush system available and still make a pigs ear out of painting your house. That said I believe these things are learnt through doing. I believe that your ears can be trained to be critical and as a discerning consumer of music then you are as qualified as anyone to decide what sounds “good” to you. Creating a fabulous mix of sound and producing an awesome end product is not easy. That’s why record companies pay producers lots of money - to ensure the quality of their product, but if you take time to learn your craft, learn the tools and maybe even seek help in books and courses then you give yourself the best chance of creating a polished, professional product. Alternatively you can be like me and get stuck in, have a go and produce something that may not be polished but is definitely you! Artists like Gomez, The Streets and The White Stripes show us that professional, polished, production isn’t necessarily the key to success. Enough preaching – Amen!

Your recording software will let you create a single mixdown file. It does this by processing all the tracks, all the effects, moving through all the automation present in the mix and rendering a file in the format of your choosing. For CD, a common destination, this will be a 16bit 44.1kHz wave file. An alternative would be to produce a file of a higher resolution, say 24bit 96kHz and then use another piece of software, something more dedicated to mastering, to do the finishing touches and create the final product before “dithering” down to 16bit 44.1kHz.

There are a couple of serious mastering programs of note, Wavelab from Steinberg and Sound Forge/CD Architech from Sony. Both are highly detailed editors of audio tracks with advanced tools for analysing and editing audio that’s not really found in your recording software. Tools like spectrum and frequency analysis so you can see how flat your music is across the frequency ranges and where it would really benefit from some EQ. They contain multiband compressors for getting your music to the right level for mastering to CD. Finally they contain all the tools required to create a master Red Book compliant audio CD that can be used for duplication. CD’s contain an eight channel data subcode along with the audio, often called “P & Q” information (although it goes from P to W) as these are the two most commonly used and important channels. “P” gives track start time information, or in a continuous piece of music it can be used to mark movements or wherever you would like the CD player to jump to when the skip button is pressed. “Q” holds the International Standard Recording Code (ISRC) which contains information about the country of origin, the year of publication, owner of the rights, as well as a serial number, and some additional tags like data track mute, and copy protection. Although Windows itself can create audio CD’s through Media Player it’s not going to let you get that deeply into it. One more cool thing is “CD Text” which is an extension of the Red Book standard that allows for album and artist name to scroll along the front of a CD player. Creating a CD of your own music and seeing your name appear when you put it in a player is such a pleasing sensation.

One other possible destination for your music is DVD, and that probably means surround sound. The top versions of recording programs have surround sound mixing built in and allow you to export 6, 8 or 11 channels of audio. The tools required to create an AC3 or Dolby encoded surround sound file for mastering are still in the hands of the professionals, so at the moment your only choice is to hand your separate channels over to a mastering house and pay a truck load of money. In a couple of years the technology will dribble down to the rest of us at more realistic prices and it will be like creating an audio CD is today.

To master something properly for release though is an artform in itself does require a bit of effort and skill. One key factor in mastering is that it shouldn’t really be done by the person who mixed it. Part of the process is that the music is listened to by another pair of ears and that gives more room for developing and processing the music in the right way to get the best out of it. I would always recommend getting some new ears to listen to your music before you decide it’s finished – take criticism, take advice and be prepared to change and edit. If you find yourself struggling with the idea of mastering then there are a few online mastering studios that have recently come onto the scene that offer their mastering skills to anyone with an Internet connection. Upload your music to them and they’ll send you back a professionally mastered version of your music. Here’s one place that does exactly this - http://www.masteringworld.com/ it’s not as expensive as you’d imagine.

So what is an “MP3”?

 It’s amazing how such a small thing can cause such a ruckus and strike fear into the heart of the mega music corporations. I’m reminded of the “Home Taping Is Killing Music” campaign that was slapped around back in the early 1980’s – it didn’t and I don’t believe it will. The music industry is certainly changing and there will be casualties along the way but once the dust settles the corporations will still be in charge but hopefully with a greater respect for the consumer.

MP3’s are a type of audio file, very similar to wave files, except they have a much smaller file size due to the fact that they have been very cleverly compressed. This has nothing to do with dynamics compression used on audio in mixing and recording, this is about data compression, like using a “zip” file. The compression is clever because it reduces the file size without reducing the quality of the audio (arguably, oh and people do like to argue). The file you end up with has the extension “.mp3” the same as a wave file has the extension “.wav”. That’s where the name comes from. Windows often hides these extensions in case they scare somebody and instead gives the file a friendly icon to represent the file type.

MP3 is the file extension for “MPEG audio layer 3”, MPEG being the “Moving Pictures Expert Group” who are a bunch of people who go around trying to compress things, like video and audio, in order to make them more manageable for computers and the internet. Audio files are big, well at least in terms of the internet. CD Quality audio, 16bit 44.1kHz in stereo uses up 10MB per minute, so a three minute song would be 30MB. A whole album would be, funnily enough, a whole CD’s worth which is about 640MB. It follows that to make the audio files smaller you could use a lower resolution like 8bit or 22kHz but this would reduce the quality of the sound.

But why would you want to reduce the size of your audio files? Well, the internet is a global publishing house. Started off with text, your text for the world to read, then images, pictures of stuff and then it became sophisticated enough to hold sound, video and other media. So you can publish your music on the net for people around the world to download and listen to. Now, your 3 minute, 30MB, potential hit, song is huge in internet terms. If you were using a regular 56k modem it could download probably half a MB per minute (with the wind behind you), so it could take easily an hour to download a single 3 minute song of CD quality. That would have to be one very devoted fan to wait that long. To make publishing audio on the internet a reality we had to find a way of reducing the file size, but without reducing the quality.

In 1995 the Fraunhofer Institute, in Germany, concentrated their efforts on purely audio encoding (all other MPEG standards have involved video) and came up with MP3, “CD quality” at a twelfth of the size of the original. So rather than an hour it might take just 6 minutes. With a Broadband connection it might take half a minute, or even better it would just playback, in real-time, straight off the web page, so suddenly people have instant access to your music.

So how do they do that then? The MP3 format uses perceptual audio coding and psychoacoustic compression to remove all superfluous information. What this means is that it removes all the stuff in the file that you don’t really hear anyway, high and low frequencies that your ears can’t detect and other clever bits of psychoacoustic skulduggery. The result is astounding and, to the untrained ear, sounds the same as the original. It’s more accurately referred to as “near CD quality”. This is of course where all the fuss about copyright and the death of the music industry comes in. People could take commercial CD’s and convert them to MP3, this is perfectly legal for you own use, but then they could email them to their friends who would, near as damn it, have a perfectly good sounding copy. Not only that but the use of file sharing programs, brought into being by the likes of “Napster”, allowed complete strangers to share their entire CD collections online for anyone to download. So, theoretically one person could buy the CD and within a few minutes everyone in the world could have a copy. Outrageous and, of course, completely illegal.

I’ll put my hand up and admit to file sharing mp3’s via Napster back in the late 1990’s. It wasn’t so much about getting music for free as to hearing tunes you hadn’t heard for ages, or always fancied listening to but would never buy the CD. It was also how I contracted my first computer virus that wiped my entire hard drive clean in front of my very eyes. Napster was forced to shut down in 2001 as a result of court action by Record Industry Association of America (RIAA).

I was always of the opinion that MP3 was a temporary technology, a workaround way of making music downloadable at a reasonable quality but as the internet got faster then people would want the full fat, high quality, wave files. But as the poor sales of DVD-Audio and SACD have shown few people are that interested in pristine audio quality and they would rather squeeze 200 MP3’s onto a CD than 5 minutes of DVD quality surround sound.

iPods, iTunes and Napster 2

With all the confusion, allegations, threats and fear surrounding the MP3 format it took a mighty company with a steady hand to cut through the rubbish and provide a money making opportunity – cue Apple. Everything about the iPod is a work of genius, the marketing, the cool factor, the design and the product itself. The iPod made digital music cool and iTunes made selling it easy. If you’re not familiar then the iPod is like the old Sony Walkman but instead of cassette you have a little hard disk onto which you can fit about 20,000 MP3 size songs. The beauty is that you can rip your entire CD collection onto your iPod, select “shuffle” and listen for the rest of your life. For many people, bored with radio, out of touch with the hit parade, it brought music back into their lives. iTunes is like one big music shop where rather than selling CD’s they sell individual tracks for download, for like 79p each. They have millions of tracks to choose from and more being added all the time. Each track has a 30 second preview so you can try before you buy – genius, although not as cheap as everyone would like.

I was suspicious of the new Napster that arrived in the UK in 2004. I had a poke around and as with iTunes I bought a few individual tracks. It was quite cool creating your own compilation CD’s and then buying them, but it was the idea of subscription that gave me a sinking feeling. You would pay a tenner, per month, and then you could download and listen to anything you liked – great, however, if you stop your subscription the music collection you’ve been building up would cease to be. My wife, tired of my moaning about it, goes and buys me a subscription to Napster for Christmas which also allows me to transfer the downloads to my Creative Labs MP3 player. Well, it’s bloody marvellous. I can lose myself for days searching for interesting things to listen to, leaping from one album via a recommendation to something completely different, picking up those old tracks I always meant to buy along the way. Slap a dozen or so albums on the MP3 player and we’re set for any journey. One criticism is that with 1.6 million tunes to choose from aren’t you going to have to trudge through an awful lot of rubbish before you find something worth listening to? This could be true but Napster have provided built in quality filters in the guise of recommended playlists, some from themselves but others from featured artists, or newspapers or magazines. They have charts of every kind and every genre so you’re not faced with just a very very long list of tracks. Interestingly Napster uses the Microsoft “wma” compression format which includes the technology it needs make subscription work. Sound quality is arguably better and Microsoft can constantly improve it within the same format whereas MP3 is stuck somewhat by it’s own standards but it’s far more compatible and cross platform whereas wma is Windows only.

Your music as MP3

For a couple of years the dream that the internet would produce a number of new, independent, successful artists flew around. You don’t need record companies, you simply upload your tunes and pretty soon, word gets around and you’re scooping up the royalties. Problem is that the chances of anyone stumbling across your music are ludicrously minute, and it’s even more unlikely that anyone would actually want to pay for it if they did find it. There were websites where you could upload your music, like mp3.com, giving you more chance of being heard but copyright allegations and the difficulty in making any money from it ultimately sealed the fate for internet based bedroom to stadium stardom dreamers. On the other hand if people have a reason to buy your music then the internet is the perfect outlet. Your website could be an extension of your usual marketing. Along with your gigs, your CD’s on sale, t-shirts, everything should be available online so that anyone who finds themselves in possession of a flyer can see what you’re about, when you next play and of course hear your music. Personally I like the idea that’s emerged of promoting your music with a couple of freebie downloads and then sell a real CD off the back of them. Using wonderful online credit card services like Paypal, and even using an eBay shop, you can take orders and sell without all the hassle of setting up companies and talking to VISA. In fact I bought a CD called Bimbling by Martha Tilston in exactly that way just last week. You see I still like physical product. I like the artwork, the album cover, the whole physical experience, and the fact that the music is mine to do with as I will.

Creating your own MP3

Most recording software comes with MP3 encoding built in. When you come to mixing down you can opt to export the mix as a MP3 file. There are various levels of compression and sound quality available in MP3 encoding which affect the file size. 128kbps (kilo bytes per second) is the accepted “near CD quality” standard that’s good enough for most people. Personally I can sometimes hear the squashing of high frequencies, especially on cymbals, and so using 256kbps tends to sort that out, although it doubles the file size. The key is to get over your own critical listening and go with what the people want.

All the information required to create a website for your music is a bit out of the scope of this article and is all available online anyway – just have a search around. You’ll find examples of my work in mp3 format on the "About me" part of the website.

Whether your destination is CD, DVD or MP3 your computer can provide all the tools you need to reach it. You can even design and print your own CD labels, inlet cards and booklets, and if you’ve got a lot of time on your hands you can sit there and duplicate your own CD’s. That said the price of getting 500 or 1000 CD’s duplicated by a professional firm is remarkably cheap and they can provide all sorts of other nice services like mastering, artwork, design, packing, copyright and barcoding. With my recently released "Molten Meditation" CD I got 2000 copies duplicated. With posh digipak packaging, full colour 12 page booklet, all shrink wrapped and ready to go I have to sell about 200 copies at £10 a go to cover the cost of 2000. That’s not insurmountable although coming up with the initial cash is always the tricky bit.