We all have listened to an MP3 before. Even if you've never used iTunes, you've probably heard an MP3 being broadcast over the radio waves without even knowing it! The concept of an MP3 is a high-quality audio file that is very small in size compared to a typical audio file. In most cases with standard MP3s, they are about 10 times smaller than their uncompressed counterparts. The development for this started in Germany during the late 1980s. It wasn't fully realized until late in 1996 when the US government issued the first patent. Here's a shocking fact: the first portable MP3 player did not hit the market until 1999! That's only about 9 years ago! With the huge invasion of Apple and it's famous (or imfamous depending on how you look at it) iPod, the world has never been the same. Music is literally everywhere all the time. The cornerstone of the whole portable music revolution is the MP3 and it's underlying technology.

Now that you've had your history lesson for the week, here's some of the nitty-gritty details that you need to know to create your very own MP3s. You must first have a regular uncompressed audio file. The most common type that home recording enthusiasts deal with is the ".WAV" file. For a 3 minute song that you've just finished mixing (and/or digital mastering), it's WAV form will be around 30 megabytes. After encoding that file to an MP3, it will be around 3 megabytes - about 10 times smaller.

Here's how you do it. You'll need a few things to get started. First, here's a great piece of software that's totally FREE - RazorLAME. Without going into too much detail, RazorLAME is a GUI (Graphical User Interface) for LAME - a high-quality MP3 encoder. RazorLAME is very straight forward to use and I've never had any problems with it. If you'd like to read the documentation, it will get you pointed in the right direction.

Once you get RazorLAME up and running, here are a few hints to ensure that you'll be creating great sounding MP3s. You can choose different quality levels. Starting at only 8 kilobits, you will get an MP3 that sounds like it's being playing through a telephone. If you notch it up to the standard 128 kilobits, it will sound almost as good as a CD. If you want it to sound as good as possible, ramp it all the way up to 320 kilobits. That will sound spot-on compared to the original CD, and it will still be much smaller than the original file! If you want a nice balance of quality and small file size, you should try encoding around 192 kilobits (my personal preference).

You need to put a tag on your freshly minted MP3 file(s). Without a tag, the MP3 will be playable, but it will not have any title, author, or album information. This causes an obvious problem if you have more than a few MP3s. The average iTunes user has around 3000 songs in their library! You can see how it would be a huge problem to not know what song is which! So, check out another free program - Mp3tag. With this program, you simply load an entire directory of MP3s - usually one directory has around 10-15 songs from a single album. Assuming you know the titles and album information already, you can edit each file individually or all of them at once. This program can even handle the renaming of your MP3 files to make them appear orderly. Way cool.

Finally, once you've picked the right quality and 'tagged' the file(s), you're ready to post them to your own website (assuming you own the copyright) or you can import them into iTunes (or an alternative).

Bottom Line: Take an uncompressed WAV file and run it through RazorLAME. Take your new MP3 and run it through Mp3tag to add the title, author, and album information. Then have Mp3tag rename the file according to your new information. That's it! You've just created a tagged MP3 that's ready for whatever you need.