Chapter 14

Music and Video on the Web

In This Chapter

Listening to music on your computer, MP3 player, or phone

Acquiring music legally

Organizing your music with iTunes, Windows Media Player, or RealPlayer

Getting audio broadcasts (podcasts)

Watching videos in your web browser

Why watch TV on a 47-inch TV screen when you can watch on a 3-inch computer window?

Ditto for full-length movies!

A thousand years ago, when we wrote the first edition of Internet For Dummies, Internet content consisted almost entirely of text. (It was 1993, but it sure feels like a thousand years ago.) You could download a few archives of pictures, and there was this weird thing, the World Wide Web, that could mix together pictures and text on the same page, but for the most part, it consisted of text: People’s connections were so slow, downloading pictures took so long, and computer screens were so fuzzy that we stuck to text. The pictures you could download were single images, such as cartoons and snapshots. Audio was nearly unheard of (so to speak), and video files were so bulky that even if you could find a clip and wait a week for it to download, it wouldn’t fit on your computer’s disk. By the late 1990s, Internet connections had sped up enough and screens had improved enough that pictures were normal fare — and audio was entering the mainstream enough that we put a twelve second voice message on our website, in case any of our readers had sound cards. (It’s still there, at net.gurus.org/ngc.wav.)

Things have advanced a little since then. Ordinary users now have Net connections that run at several million bits per second — faster than the main backbones of the early 1990s — and computer disks have gotten enormous beyond imagining. Passing around audio and video over the Net has become practical and widespread. In fact, the amounts of available audio and video are now so vast that you could spend your entire life looking at online commercials without ever finding anything worth watching. This chapter tries to bring a little order to the vast wasteland of online media.

To avoid writing audio and/or video a hundred more times in this chapter, henceforth we use the concise (albeit imprecise) term media to refer to them.

Seven Ways to Get Media and One Way Not To

You can get your media fix in approximately ten zillion different programs and formats. Fortunately, they fall into a modest number of categories: free, streaming, purchased, shared, rental, and outright stolen.

Receiving media as a gift

The simplest approach is to download media offered for free and then play it. Visit www.nasa.gov/multimedia, where NASA has lots of free little movies on topics ranging from dust storms on Mars to how a roller coaster ride feels like taking off in the space shuttle. You can also find independent movies and videos from producers more interested in letting people see their work than in charging for it. Visit epitonic.com for an eclectic collection of music by artists, some well known and some obscure, released so that people can listen to it and make their own mixes.

Borrowing media by streaming it

Even on a broadband connection, downloading a whole media clip can take a while. Rather than download first and play later, streaming media downloads as it plays, thereby re-creating (in a complex digital manner) the way that radio and TV have worked since the 1920s. As with TV and radio, after it’s streamed, it’s gone — and if you want to play it again, you have to stream it again. Streaming audio can work over a dialup connection, but streaming video needs a broadband connection.

Most streaming media is provided on demand: You click a link and they send you whatever it is, sort of like a jukebox. Alternatively, sometimes streaming media is a single program to which you can listen in and hear what’s playing at any moment. Not surprisingly, it’s named Internet radio, and in many cases the audio stream is an actual radio program, such as our local public radio stations at wrvo.fm in upstate New York and www.vpr.net (click Listen Live) in Vermont. We say more about Internet radio in the section “Listening to Internet radio” later in this chapter.

Buying media

Apple iTunes makes buying music and video easy. Go to www.apple.com/itunes to listen to the first little bit of any song in its catalog. If you like it, you can buy your own, permanent copy (usually for 99 cents) that you can copy to your iPod, play on your computer, or burn on a CD. You don’t have to be a Mac user to use iTunes; you can play the tunes by using the Windows version of the iTunes program. (See the section “Organizing your music with iTunes,” later in this chapter.) It’s no surprise that people buy in droves, making iTunes the biggest online music store. Likewise, many more websites sell music either from a web-based store or as an add-on to a rental service, most for about the same price as at iTunes.

Apple makes it easy to listen to and watch your iTunes music and videos on an iPhone, iPod, or iPad. If you have an Android or other smartphone or tablet, programs are also available for transferring your music and videos to your phone.

Amazon.com (www.amazon.com), the world’s largest bookstore, also sells downloadable tunes in MP3 format. The sale catalog is considerably larger than the streaming catalog for Amazon Prime customers (customers who pay about $100 a year for free two-day shipping and other perks).

Playing media from CDs or DVDs you already own

You probably own a whole lot of digital music in the form of music CDs. Copying your music CDs to your computer is known as ripping, and it’s easy to do. Windows Media Player, iTunes, and other music programs can copy all tracks from a CD and put the songs into your music library so that you can play them from your computer (without the CD) or copy them to your MP3 player. See “Copying music from your own CDs,” later in this chapter.

Subscribing to media services

You can subscribe to audio programs over the Internet. A podcast is an audio file distributed over the Net for listening to on an iPod or another type of MP3 player or any computer with speakers. Many radio shows are available as podcasts; go to www.npr.org to find many of them. Lots of organizations and people make podcasts, too. See the section “Subscribing to podcasts with iTunes,” later in this chapter, for instructions.

Sharing media

The original version of Napster was the first well-known music exchange service, allowing members to download MP3 music files from each other for free. The system was the first large-scale peer-to-peer (P2P) information exchange, where people exchange files with each other rather than download them from a central library. Eventually, the big record labels sued and shut it down because most of the material that people exchanged was in flagrant violation of the music’s copyright. Napster was later reincarnated as a site for music rental and free online music streaming — but no free downloading.

The popular file-sharing system BitTorrent (www.bittorrent.com) has thus far been able to fly under the legal radar, unlike LimeWire (www.limewire.com), which was shut down by a court order. They resemble an earlier Napster — a network from which you can download music for free, a certain amount of which is provided against the wishes of the owners of said music. While you’re downloading music from other people’s computers, they are in turn downloading music from you, so they can significantly slow down your computer and your Internet connection. The music industry insists that these folks are morally reprehensible, but people use BitTorrent in particular to share large amounts of entirely legal and legitimate material along with the dodgy stuff. We suggest that you stay away from it — as legal music gets cheaper and cheaper, why risk breaking the law to save a few bucks?

Renting media

A great deal of music isn’t available for free, but it’s available for cheap. Services such as Real Networks Rhapsody (www.real.com/rhapsody) offer monthly subscriptions that let you listen to large libraries of recorded music. Amazon (www.amazon.com) offers streaming music as part of their $99/yr Prime package. Spotify (www.spotify.com) offers a basic service with ads for free, or premium with no ads and some extra features for $10/mo ($5 for students.)

These rental services have enormous catalogs of music, and each one claims to be the largest. They really are large: While checking out Rhapsody, we were finally able to do a side-by-side comparison of Desi Arnaz’s muscular late-1940s version of Babalu and his mentor Xavier Cugat’s more elegant 1941 recording. (You’ll just have to decide for yourself which one you like better.) However, when you stop paying rent, your music vanishes. Remember — you never owned it.

You can find video rental websites too — not just for renting a DVD but also for downloading the video over the Internet and watching it on your computer. For example, Netflix, at www.netflix.com, is known for its DVD-rental-by-mail service, but you can also stream videos on demand. Not all its DVDs are available for streaming, but for the ones that are, you see a Play button on the website. Amazon Prime includes video on demand, too.

Stealing media — um, no

Plenty of pirated stuff is still on the Net, and probably always will be. We expect that our readers, because they’re of good moral character, wouldn’t want to look for it, but if you do, you have to do so without our help.

What Are You Listening With?

The two most popular programs used for playing web-based online media are Windows Media Player and Apple iTunes. These include separate player programs and plug-ins for web browsers so that web pages can embed little windows that show movies or play music.

iTunes

  www.apple.com/itunes

Apple iTunes, shown in Figure 14-1, has become insanely popular because you have to use it if you have an iPhone or iPod. In addition to playing and organizing music, iTunes is the way to load music from your computer onto the iPod or iPhone. You may have heard of it as a music store and a way to organize music, but iTunes can play all sorts of media, including videos. iTunes supports streaming video as well as audio in most popular formats.

Ripping CDs to your computer and keeping your music organized in iTunes are described later in this chapter.

Windows Media Player

  www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia

Microsoft has its own streaming audio and video formats, and it bundles a player for them with Windows. The Windows Media Player program, shown in Figure 14-2, can play files in Advanced Systems Format (with the extension .asf or .asx), in addition to most other formats. More recent versions added useful new features, so if you don’t have Media Player version 11 or later, it’s worth your time to visit Windows Update or the Media Player site to download it. (Media Player itself may nag you to upgrade, if you have an older version.)

Click the Music and Videos tabs on the left side of the Media Player window to see which audio and video files you have. Click Media Guide to browse links to popular music. When you put an audio CD into your computer’s CD or DVD drive, it displays the list of tracks on the CD and you can click Rip CD to rip (copy) tracks from the CD to your hard drive and to your Windows Media Player library. You can also burn music CDs by clicking the Burn tab.

Okay, How about Some Music?

Two hot activities on the Internet are downloading and exchanging music files with your friends in the MP3 file format. MP3 stands for MPEG level 3 (acronyms within acronyms — how technoid) and is simply the soundtrack format used with MPEG movies. Because this format is widely available and does a good job of compressing music to a reasonable size for downloading, it has been adopted by music lovers on the Net. As you may already have guessed, MP3 players (similar to the iPod and little, less-expensive devices from Sandisk and Rio) can play MP3 files, too, which is the main reason for their popularity. Many cellphones can play MP3 files, too.

You can play MP3 files by using many different programs, including iTunes and Windows Media Player. This section explains how to use iTunes to organize music, subscribe to podcasts, make playlists, and listen to radio stations over the Internet because all the programs are fairly similar. If you use Windows Media Player, you get the general idea.

Naturally, Microsoft has the competing file format WMA, with the extension .wma. iTunes can also handle WMA files.

Copying music from your own CDs

You already own tons of music on those racks of CDs that will soon be obsolete. You can rip (copy) the tracks from an audio CD by using iTunes. When you put an audio CD into your computer’s CD drive, iTunes asks whether you want to import the tracks into your iTunes library. Click Yes to begin copying. iTunes looks up the CD using an online database so that you can see the titles of the tracks and even the album artwork.

When you rip music from CDs, you can specify which format to store the files in. We use the MP3 format because the files are smaller than some other formats and because every music player can handle MP3s. In iTunes, choose Edit⇒Preferences or iTunes⇒Preferences, click the General tab if it isn’t already selected, click the Import Settings button, click the Import Using option, set it to MP3 Encoder, and click OK twice. You can also choose the quality, where you trade off file size against sound quality.

Organizing your music with iTunes

Apple iTunes (www.apple.com/itunes) lets you buy legal, downloaded songs for a reasonable price, 99 cents apiece and up, based on popularity. Both Mac and Windows users can buy and play songs from iTunes by downloading the free iTunes program, which is excellent for keeping your songs organized even if you don’t have an iPod or buy from the iTunes store. Click iTunes Store to browse the store — iTunes turns into a web browser to enable you to click around to find audio and video files. Apple iPhones and iPads come with an iTunes app pre-installed.

Making playlists

In iTunes, you can organize your music into playlists, which are your own customized albums. One playlist can be music you like to listen to while washing the dishes, and another playlist might be for your fabulous oldies collection. Or, each user of your computer can have her own playlists. You can have as many playlists as you like. (Margy has one playlist of the baritone parts she needs to learn for her women’s barbershop group, Maiden Vermont, and another playlist of instrumental jazz, 1960s rock, and Hindu chanting to listen to while working.)

You create a new playlist by choosing File⇒New Playlist or by pressing Ctrl+N. In the iTunes app, touch Playlists at the bottom of the screen and then New Playlist. You can name the playlist whatever you want and then drag in music from your library. Dragging a song from the library to a playlist doesn’t remove it from the library or copy the file — you can put the same song into multiple playlists, and all the while it continues to be stored in your general iTunes library just once. You can also create a “Genius playlist” by specifying a song that you like; iTunes shows you a playlist of similar songs.

Subscribing to Podcasts

Podcasts are audio magazines that deliver MP3 files of talk or music directly to your computer (see the section “Subscribing to media services,” earlier in this chapter). The word is a combination of iPod and broadcast, but you don’t need an iPod to listen to them — any computer or MP3 player will do. Radio programs, companies, musicians, comedians, and just plain people produce podcasts about a huge variety of different subjects, everything from “The Twilight Saga” to the stock market.

Video podcasts are the same idea, but you receive video rather than audio files.

Subscribing to podcasts on the web

Several websites provide directories of podcasts, including LearnOutLoud’s directory at www.learnoutloud.com/Podcast-Directory and Podcastdirectory.com. They enable you to find podcasts by topic, subscribe to them, and listen to them from the website.

Or, go to the website of the program you want to subscribe to. National Public Radio at www.npr.org originates dozens of podcasts. We enjoy:

• Radiolab, at www.radiolab.org, with science-based stories
• Serial, at serialpodcast.org, from the makers of This American Life (another great podcast, at thisamericanlife.org)
• The TED Radio Hour, at www.npr.org/programs/ted-radio-hour
• Welcome to Night Vale, at www.commonplacebooks.com, a weird drama for young hipsters
• Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me, at www.npr.org/programs/wait-wait-dont-tell-me, a weekly news quiz

Subscribing to podcasts with iTunes

To subscribe to a podcast, click the iTunes Store link in iTunes and then click the Podcasts link. When you find a podcast that looks interesting, you can click an episode to listen to it on the spot or click the Subscribe button to receive all future episodes automatically. Most podcasts are free, and iTunes downloads the latest episodes every time you start the program.

Playing Music and Podcasts

If you want to listen to music or podcasts while you’re sitting in front of your computer, you’re all set — fire up iTunes or Windows Media Player and listen. But we hear that some people actually have lives and want to listen to music in other places.

You can buy a portable MP3 player — an iPod, a cheaper alternative from another manufacturer, or a phone that includes an MP3 player — and take thousands of MP3 cuts to listen to while you jog, travel, or just hang out. Your smartphone probably has an MP3 player app, like iTunes on the iPhone. (Android users can search the Google Play Store for an app; there are dozens, including DoubleTwist and Google Play Music.) You hook your MP3 player to your computer whenever you want to download new tunes. These players can hold weeks of music and podcasts. The most popular is the ubiquitous Apple iPod, but other players are cheaper and work fine. Only iPods and other i-devices can play M4P (copy-protected) music and only files to which you own a license.

Listening to Internet Radio

If you like to listen to music while you work, check out real radio stations or Internet-only radio stations. Most radio stations now stream their talk and music on the Internet in addition to broadcasting it over the air. Go to a radio station’s website and click the Listen Now or similarly named link — for example, we’re listening to a show about backyard chickens at wbur.org as we write this section. Many radio stations have MP3 players built into their websites.

Tuning in to a station

Like real radio stations, Internet-only stations offer a mix of music and talk and sometimes commercials. Unlike real (broadcast) radio stations, they’re extremely cheap to set up, so lots and lots of people do — providing lots of quirky little niche stations run by people all over the world. You listen to them in a streaming program, usually iTunes or Windows Media. Most are available for free, some require a subscription, and some have a subscription option to make the ads go away.

If you use iTunes, click the Radio link in iTunes to get started. You see a menu of different types of stations, and after choosing one, you can peruse stations from across the country at your leisure for free. Double-click a station to listen to it.

To get started, here are some directories of Internet radio stations:

• SHOUTcast Radio Directory, at shoutcast.com, gives you a choice of its website or your existing player. (This website lets you know that they use cookies, described in Chapter 7, to remember what kinds of stations you’ve requested.)
• StreamFinder.com has an audio player right on the web page.
• Live 365 Internet Radio, at http://www.live365.com, streams several thousand stations with every possible kind of music.

Either way (broadcast radio or Internet-only radio), you can listen to talk and music from all over the United States — or the world.

Making your own station

Every radio station — Internet or broadcast — chooses a range of styles of music to play. Why should you be limited to the musical tastes of existing radio stations? Instead, you can create your own musical mix, including music you don’t even own!

Enter Pandora Radio, at www.pandora.com (shown in Figure 14-3). As its website states, it’s a new kind of radio station, one that plays only music you like. Type the names of a musician or group or the name of a song and Pandora finds, in its huge musical database, music that’s similar to what you specify. You can’t play the exact song you want, but you can play similar music, displaying information about the artist and album. When Pandora guesses wrong about what it thinks you like, you can click the thumbs-down icon to kill the song. When it guesses right, click the thumbs-up icon to tell it to play more songs like that one.

You can name your “radio station” and have several stations for different kinds of music — maybe one for working and another for paying bills. You can also share your radio station with other people so that they can listen to the mix you have created.

Jango, at www.jango.com, and last.fm (at last.fm — no .com) work like Pandora. Many of these sites also have apps for iPhones, Androids, and other smartphones and tablet computers.

Watching Movies on the Web

Now that most people have fast Internet connections, watching video over the Net has become possible and popular. You can watch short videos at YouTube, television shows, or entire movies or upload your own videos for others to watch.

Older web browsers can’t play videos — you need to get a player program. You also need a reasonably fast computer to display movies in anything close to real time. Flash, the most widely used player, plugs into your web browser (download it for free from get.adobe.com/flashplayer). iTunes and Windows Media Player also handle movies (and are described earlier in this chapter). No popular mobile devices — not the iPhone, iPod touch, iPad, nor any Android device — supports Flash, the technology that web browsers use to display video, so not all these options will work on these devices. Fortunately, most video providers have apps you can use on mobile devices.

The YouTube thing

Probably the largest Internet video phenomenon is YouTube (www.youtube.com). It’s a site like Google (which owns YouTube), but rather than an Internet search engine for information at large, it’s only for videos. On YouTube you can find everything from Saturday Night Live clips to previews for upcoming movies to strange homemade Lego flicks. According to the New York Times, people post more than 100 million videos on YouTube every day – 48 hours of video uploaded every minute, with over 3 billion video views every day. Unfortunately, Google is losing an amazing amount of money on YouTube every day because few advertisers want their ads displayed alongside such a weird and unpredictable collection of videos.

In the Search bar, you can type a word or phrase related to the video you’re looking for and YouTube displays a list of links of possible videos, as shown in Figure 14-4. Click the image or title to play the video. Video-playing software is embedded in the website, so you need nothing but an Internet connection to watch videos on YouTube. (See the later sidebar “Too many video file formats.”) If you see a video you like a lot and want to share with your 50 closest friends, you can click the Share link below the video to email a link, post a tweet on Twitter (see Chapter 11), or write it on your Facebook wall, as described in Chapter 10.

Other YouTube-like websites include Vimeo (www.vimeo.com), Metacafe (www.metacafe.com), and Bing Videos (bing.com/videos). Justin.tv (at www.justin.tv, with no .com) shows live video — stuff that’s happening right now. The Online Video Guide (www.ovguide.com) can help you find TV and movies on the web.

If you have an iPhone, iPod, iPad, or Android device, you can’t display YouTube in its web browser. Instead, they come with a YouTube app preinstalled.

Putting the “You” in YouTube

You can upload a video to YouTube as long as it’s on your computer, you own the copyright (YouTube deletes stolen videos), it’s neither defamatory nor pornographic, and it’s no longer than ten minutes. To upload, follow these steps:

1. Create a free YouTube account by clicking the Sign In link in the upper right corner of any YouTube page.

   Or, sign in to your existing account. If you have a Google account, use it.

2. Click the Upload button.

   Or, click the Post a Video Response link below an existing video.

3. Select the video file on your computer and follow the instructions.

   You can choose whether to make the video public or private, name the video, add a description and keywords, and specify which category it’s in. YouTube uploads your video and converts it to the Flash format for streaming. Uploading can take a while (ten minutes or more) depending on the speed of your Internet connection.

After your video is on YouTube, you can share it with your friends.

If a video is public on YouTube, it’s really, really public. Think twice about including personally identifying information about yourself or your kids unless the video is something you’re truly proud of. After you upload a file, you can click your account name in the upper right corner of the web page, choose My Videos, click the Edit button below a video, and change the Broadcasting and Sharing Options from Public to Unlisted (anyone with the link can view) or Private (only people you choose can view).

Watching movies

You can stream movies from the web, although usually not for free (at least, not legally). If you have a Netflix account to receive DVDs by mail, you can add streaming videos from its website (www.netflix.com) for a little extra, or turn off the DVDs-by-mail subscription and just pay for streaming. Netflix has a huge inventory of videos available for streaming, although some titles are available only on DVD. On the website, you add movies to your queue if you want to watch them later or receive the DVD by mail. Or, click the Watch Instantly tab to find a movie and watch it now.

Amazon.com offers a Video On Demand service, which enables you to stream movies for a fee. You can save movies for later after you pay for them or watch previously purchased videos again. Choose the Movies Music & Games department and then click Amazon Instant Video. Their Amazon Prime service requires an annual fee, includes instant video, and is cheaper than individual rentals if you watch more than two movies a month (as well as the streaming music described earlier in the chapter, rental e-books, faster package delivery, and 20% off your diaper subscription.)

Watching TV

Missed your favorite television show? Didn’t record it on your TiVo? You might be able to catch it on Hulu, at www.hulu.com or the Hulu app on your mobile device. It’s supported by ABC, Fox, NBC, and others, so it shows entire episodes, not ten-minute clips, and has copyrighted shows that aren’t available anywhere else online, at least not legally. YouTube has responded with YouTube Shows, at www.youtube.com/shows, which is different from the regular YouTube site; like Hulu, it has commercial video, with no amateur uploads.

Blip.tv (at blip.tv — no .com at the end) hosts shows you may never have heard of because they’re made by independent creators. Link TV at www.linktv.org shows educational programs from around the world.

Netflix has television shows as well as movies, so if you have a Netflix account, you can stream TV, too.