When it comes to my MP3 files I like having the album art included with it and directly embedded in the file. In Windows XP I was using a specific program to do this but it wouldn’t work in Windows 7, so I had to find something else that would do the job.

There is EasyTAG, a multi-platform program that works great in Linux or Windows, but the interface is definitely better suited for Linux as it doesn’t take advantage of any Windows-specific menu features.

After some searching I came across Mp3tag – and it’s awesome because it makes adding in album art very easy.

Before continuing, some MP3 tagging programs embed the album art in the MP3 file while others do not. I wanted one that specifically did embed. The ones that don’t simply save the image files separately alongside the MP3s (like WinAMP does.) This can cause big clutter in short order, and you definitely don’t want that.

The great thing about Mp3tag is that it works in XP, Vista or 7, is very light on its feet and easy to use.

Here’s an example of how it works:

First, have your album art ready for whatever MP3 you want to embed it to, be it a GIF or JPEG file.

When you first load Mp3tag, click File then Change Directory or press CTRL+D to go to the directory to where your MP3 files are.

Highlight the MP3 you want to add art to, right-click the cover area at bottom left, then choose Add Cover, like this:

After that, navigate to where your cover art is, open it, and it will show in the area:

After that, click File then Save tag or just press CTRL+S.

This is to date the easiest way I’ve seen to manually add in cover art for MP3 files, and believe me I’ve tried a bunch of different programs for this task. Mp3tag definitely has them all beat..

..unless anyone can find one better that’s free?

If you are tired of the ’same old – same old’ music you hear on the radio and are looking for something new, finding sites which cater to budding musicians is an excellent place to look. I used to be a huge fan of mp3.com about 10 years ago (before commercial music took it over) as it was a great place to find good quality amateur music.

A couple of sites I have come across recently seem to be in the same spirit:

• Magnatune
• Jamendo

Both are artist-centric and are not focused on promoting the latest radio single. Additionally, if you decide to purchase any music from artists, the site gives a sizable portion directly to the artist.

When optical drives started to become the norm in home computers, all of a sudden there were two types of CD-Rs for sale, the data kind and the "music" kind.

As to the question of whether or not a CD labeled as a "music" disc is safe to write data to or not, the answer is yes.

Are they as reliable as "regular" data CD-Rs? I’ll answer that in a moment.

Bear in mind there literally is nothing that makes any CD-R a "music" disc. It’s just a marketing term. Any writeable CD-R can be a "music" disc and any "music" disc can have data written to it instead of audio tracks.

As far as the reliability of a "music" disc goes, that’s where you start to see the real differences.

Concerning reliability, a "music" disc is not as reliable as a data disc because they typically fail what I call the see-thru test.

The see-thru test is this: How transparent is the disc? If you hold it up to a light, can you see right thru it easily? And if so, how easily?

The more transparent a disc is, the less aluminum there is, the less reliable the disc will be in the long run – because you’re got more plastic than aluminum at that point. It will (not might) degrade faster.

To note: Truly good data CD-Rs have little to no transparency at all.

The only reason anyone ever buys "music" discs for data use is because they’re dirt cheap. However there are a few uses for those cheap discs:

• They’re good as throw-aways that you can give to friends (ex: burn a Linux distro on a cheapo disc, give it away..)
• They’re good for game disc backups. For example, I have an old game called Jedi Academy but I don’t use the original discs. Instead I copied them for my own personal use and use those for gameplay. And if the copies screw up, no big deal. I just make more.

It also should be noted "music" discs usually have a maximum write speed of 32x. That’s as fast as they’ll write and no faster.

So the only real differences is that "music" has an inferior life span and write speed compared to traditional data CD-Rs.

If you need some throw-aways, go ahead and buy a few.

But don’t use them as a primary backup.

Pandora.com is quite a nice web application. If you’re not familiar with Internet Radio, it’s a way to stream music to your computer according to may want to listen to, without having to create mixes of music on your own. Most of the time, there’s no audio advertising, which was one upside to mixing your own music.

Pandora is different from other Internet Radio stations in that you’re not locked into what the stream owners play (much like how FM radio runs), but you can actually rate which songs you like or don’t like.

You start out creating a station by selecting a specific song or artist you like, and Pandora branches out and tries to find music similar to that. Only, a lot of the time, it branches out too far and ends up playing music that you don’t really want to hear. It’s at this point that most people wander away with the idea that “Pandora sucks”. Continued