The MP3 Book, Table of Contents

May 09, 2000

Back in early 2000 I was approached by a publisher to write a book about about MP3 audio technology; I only wrote the first two chapters before my senior project duties eclipsed book-writing and I needed to shelve the project indefinitely. 20 years later, in 2020, I’ve resurrected what I had written and am re-publishing it.

Here was the Table of Contents for the book as I had originally envisioned it.

Chapter 0: Introduction
- What’s In This Book
- Who This Book Is For
- How To Read This Book
Chapter 1: The Hype
- What Is Internet Audio and Why Do People Use It?
- Some Thoughts on the New Economy
- A Brief History of Internet Audio
- Bell Labs, 1957 - Computer Music Is Born
- Compression in Movies & Radio - MP3 is Invented!
- The Net Circa 1996: RealAudio, MIDI, and .AU
- The MP3 Explosion
- 1996 - The Release
- 1997 - The Early Adopters
- 1998 - The Explosion
- sidebar - The MP3 Summit
- 1999 - Commercial Acceptance
- Why Did It Happen?
- Hardware
- Open Source -> Free, Convenient Software
- Standards
- Memes: Idea Viruses
- Conclusion
Chapter 2: The Guts of Music Technology
- Digital Audio Basics
- Understanding Fourier
- The Biology of Hearing
- Psychoacoustic Masking
- Normal Masking
- Tone Masking
- Noise Masking
- Critical Bands and Prioritization
- Fixed-Point Quantization
- Conclusion
Chapter 3: Modern Audio Codecs
- MPEG Evolves
- MP2
- MP3
- AAC / MPEG-4
- Other Internet Audio Codecs
- AC-3 / Dolbynet
- RealAudio G2
- VQF
- QDesign Music Codec 2
- EPAC
- Summary
Chapter 4: The New Pipeline: The New Way To Produce, Distribute, and Listen to Music
- Digital Recording
- to DAT (studio) from CD (post-master)
- MIDI Studios
- Digital Editing
- Digital Distribution
- Digital Consumption
- Portable Digital Audio
Chapter 5: Software Tools
- Encoding
- Audio Catalyst
- BladeEnc
- Fraunhofer’s tools
- Liquid Audio
- MusicMatch
- Microsoft
- RealJukebox / RealEncoder
- WinDAC32 & Other Rippers
- 3rd Party Encoding
- Playback
- WinAMP
- Sonique
- Microsoft
- FreeAMP
- RealPlayer
- Other Players
- Serving
- RealServer
- Shoutcast & Icecast
- Microsoft
- 3rd party Serving
- Live365
- Myplay
- Summary
Chapter 6: The Law
- What Are You Allowed To Do With Music?
- Recording Rights, Composition Rights
- Streaming, Downloading, and Public Performance
- What Laws Are There?
- The Audio Home Recording Act of 1992
- The Digital Millenium Copyright Act of 1995
- The “No Net Copy” Act of 1997
- Where To Look For More Information
- Summary
Chapter 7: The Security Issue
- Encryption Systems
- Liquid Audio
- a2bmusic
- mjuice
- Microsoft’s ASX
- Watermarking Systems
- Aris
- SDMI
- Whence eMusic?
- Why People Will Try To Protect Music Even When It’s Impossible
- Why MP3 Will Be Slow To Die
- Summary
Chapter 8: How Artists Can Use The Internet (Push Out / Suck In)
- The Consumer Is Your Network: How and Why Superdistribution Works
- How To Push Out (Be Heard!)
- How To Suck In (Get Visitors!)
- How To Make Money From Your Fans
Chapter 9: Enjoying Internet Music
- The Hunt For Good Music
- Indies
- MP3.com
- AMP3.com
- EMusic.com
- Liquid Music Network
- Popular Music
- MusicMaker
- Napster
- IRC
- Friends!
- Streaming
- The Portable Issue
- Burning Audio CDs
- Burning MP3 CDs
- Portable MP3 Players
- Summary
The Leaders of the Revolution
- Michael Robertson, MP3.com
- Karlheinz Brandenberg, FHG IIS
- Shawn Fanning, Napster
- Jim Griffin, OneHouse/Cherry Lane Digital
- Gene Hoffman, eMusic
- Justin Frankel, Nullsoft/AOL
- Phil Wiser, Liquid Audio
- Jack Moffit, Icecast
- Doug Camplejohn, MyPlay
- Ram Samuldrala
- Summary
Chapter 10: The Future
- What are the Labels Scared of?
- Personalized Radio
- Donation Systems / Shareware Music
- Multichannel Audio
- Interactive Music
- Collaborative Composition
- Voice-Based Composition
- “Cyberskat”
- Digital Video
- Summary
Appendix A: The Author’s Story
Appendix B: Web Resources