The Love Your Music eBook -- “everything you ever wanted to know about digital music” or your money back.

The Love Your Music eBook is guaranteed to contain “everything you ever wanted to know about digital music” or your money back.

Love Your Music will show you:

Which media player software is best for you and how to get it for FREE.
Which iPod or other portable media player/MP3 player is best for you.
How to listen to your favorite music all the time, quickly and easily.
The best, least expensive and fully-legal places to get all the music you want for less than $10 per month.
Descriptions of MP3 and other music file formats and technologies and how to avoid getting stuck with proprietary solutions that lock you in and waste your money.
How to turn digital music technology into your friend so you can Love Your Music more each day.

The Love Your Music ebook shows you how to harness music technologies and remove your frustrations so that you can enjoy music more.

This information is only available together in one place -- the Love Your Music eBook. No other book, website, blog or other source compiles all of this information in such a friendly, easy-to-use manner.

Love Your Music is readily accessible to beginners and has many advanced tips and tricks that will be new to experienced users.

Start harnessing music technologies and remove your frustrations so that you can fully enjoy your music -- download the Love Your Music eBook now!

What others are saying about Love Your Music

Nick Martin makes the daunting task of organizing digital music digestible to even the most non computer savvy of people. Love Your Music lays out how a wallflower can take control of their music and become a dance commander. Best of all, it's fun to read.

-- Dylan Darling, Redding, CA

James, Portland, OR

Amy

I consider myself technically savvy, but in the area of digital music, I was lacking in knowledge. I was very confused on all the different music technology terms. Love Your Music taught me all I need to know about how to organize my digital music collection. It was easy to read and understand. I'm excited to begin using my iPod effortlessly and effectively. I'm also excited to have improv dance parties for my 2 little kiddos, who love to shake their sillies out.

-- Amy, Oregon

Download the Love Your Music eBook now!

Are you...

…new to digital music technologies like MP3s, iTunes , personal computers and iPods?

Maybe you don’t know an MP3 from an M3U or iPod from iTunes.
Love Your Music explains how to get up and running quickly.
Do you know which music file format to use? Do you know which media player software is best for you? Do you know which online music store is compatible with your portable media player?
Love Your Music helps you avoid expensive mistakes that could cost you thousands of dollars and hundreds of lost hours. Love Your Music prevents you from painting yourself into a technology corner.

…a fan who wants to focus on music instead of technology?

Love Your Music shows you how to listen to music that is perfect for every situation, occasion and mood, quickly and easily.
Love Your Music will help you select products that are right for you.
Love Your Music shows you the best ways to find new music that are suited to your tastes and preferences.
Love Your Music shows you how to listen to new albums the day they come out for a monthly flat rate.

…someone that wants to save time and money?

Love Your Music shows you how to listen to millions of high-quality, legal songs for a low flat monthly fee.
Love Your Music can help you choose the new portable media player that has the most value for you.
Love Your Music shows you how to consistently buy new albums for $5 or less.
Love Your Music shows you how to set a new music budget to get the best value at a given price per month.
Have you ever lost your music collection when your hard drive crashed or your computer was stolen?
Love Your Music tells you how to back it up so that you will never lose it again.

Are you...

…an experienced digital music user?

Love Your Music will show you little-known tips and insider tricks to get even more out of your music collection.
Are you making perfect playlists in seconds?
Love Your Music can show you how.
Are you able to listen to your music at the office, even when you forget your iPod at home?
Love Your Music explains how to do it.
Are the tracks in your music collection missing information like artist name, genre, track numbers, etc?
Love Your Music will show you how to clean up your track information easily and automatically and how to leverage your metadata to maximize your music enjoyment.
Do you regularly listen to your music on shuffle because you don’t know which songs you want to listen to, but then you keep hearing songs that you don’t like?
Love Your Music shows you a better way.

…a parent whose child is just getting into digital music?

Do you have a child who wants his or her first iPod?
Love Your Music will help you choose the right portable media player for your needs and budget.
Are you confused about how to get new music legally without destroying your budget?
Love You Music will show you music buying options for any budget, including how to get millions of songs for a flat monthly fee -- all legally.
Don’t want to listen to junior’s teen-pop sensation? Junior doesn’t want to listen to your “ancient” music?
Love Your Music explains how to manage both your music collection and that of your child.
Do you know which portable media player you should get for your child to meet your budget and their needs?
Love Your Music will show you the options and help you make a decision.

…in high school or college?

Do want to know the best ways to play music for your friends at parties or while hanging out?
Love Your Music shows you the best way.
Do you want to learn the fool-proof way to throw an awesome dance party?
Love Your Music explains it in nine easy steps.
Want to know how to create a playlist for any party in seconds?
Love Your Music shows you how to quickly make a playlist for Halloween, New Years, birthdays or any other occasion.

Download the Love Your Music eBook now!

What will you get out of this book?

You’ll get the following benefits by reading Love Your Music.

Save yourself time: listen to music that suits any occasion or mood quickly and easily. Learn how to listen to the right music in seconds, rather than minutes or hours.

Flexibility in accessing your music collection: listen to your music any time, any place. You’ll learn how to be able to play your music quickly, easily and conveniently, no matter where you go.

You’ll learn how to save money (potentially thousands of dollars):
- Learn how to get music cheaply and legally.
- Learn which portable media player is right for you.
- Learn how to keep your music collection ready for future changes in technology and companies’ goods and services.

You’ll be the best informed:
- You’ll learn about the different music standards, formats, software, services and portable media players and which of these will work best for you.
- You'll know which media player software is best for you.
- You’ll understand and utilize the power of playlists so that you always listen to music you want to hear.
- You won’t get trapped into using only one particular company’s media format or software. Make your music work for you – don’t become a pawn of huge media and software companies.
- You’ll be able to help your friends and family with their music collections.

You’ll learn where to find the latest music news and stay informed on new digital music products and services.
Security: you’ll have the peace of mind that you have protected and enhanced your significant investment in your music collection. You’ll learn how and where to backup your digital music so that it can never be lost or stolen.
Get more enjoyment out of your music collection. You’ll stop worrying and love your music again. You will have fun with your music and do it quickly and easily!

Download the Love Your Music eBook now!

Love Your Music Table of Contents

Below is the table of contents from Love Your Music. Here you can see the huge amount of valuable information that you can use today.

Preface

Love Your Music ............................................................................... 2
What is Love Your Music not about? ............................................................ 2
What is Love Your Music about? ................................................................ 3
Where I‘m coming from ......................................................................... 3
This book was written for… .................................................................... 4
Have you had these problems? .................................................................. 4
What will you get out of this book? ........................................................... 5
How to read Love Your Music ................................................................... 6
Some really great recommendation .............................................................. 9
How to use the book navigation features in Adobe Reader ...................................... 10
About the Author – Nick Martin ............................................................... 13
Acknowledgments............................................................................... 18
Reasons you‘re loving your music more after the preface ...................................... 18

Chapter 1: How Your Digital Music is Stored and Played on Your Computer

Streaming vs. downloading .................................................................... 20
Files ........................................................................................ 23
Which file type should I use for my music collection? ........................................ 27
Playlist file types .......................................................................... 29
Directory structure .......................................................................... 29
Which directory structure works best? ........................................................ 30
Multiple users, multiple music collections, one computer – one big mess? ..................... 34
Metadata ..................................................................................... 35
How do I make sure my metadata is the best it can be? ........................................ 42
Should I delete songs I don‘t like? .......................................................... 46
Media player software......................................................................... 46
Which media player software should I use on my computer? ..................................... 50
Reasons you‘re loving your music more after chapter 1 ........................................ 51

Chapter 2: Acquiring music

Ripping CDs................................................................................... 53
Which settings should I use when ripping CDs? ................................................ 54
Illegal options............................................................................... 54
Two ways to acquire music: buy and rent ...................................................... 55
When should I rent; when should I buy? ....................................................... 58
What special considerations are there for managing rented music? ............................. 58
Online music stores .......................................................................... 59
DRM .......................................................................................... 64
Recommenders ................................................................................. 66
Which recommenders should I use? ............................................................. 70
Digital music kingdoms at war ................................................................ 71
Where should I get my digital music? ......................................................... 73
Reasons you‘re loving your music more after chapter 2 ........................................ 75

Chapter 3: Enjoying Your Music

Take your music with you: portable media players ............................................. 77
Note to tricky guys (and gals) on rental music and PMPs ...................................... 78
Which portable media player (PMP) should I buy? .............................................. 81
Which media player software should I use for managing my portable media player? .............. 83
Other things to remember about your PMP ...................................................... 83
Shopping for PMP accessories.................................................................. 84
Strange story of PlaysForSure and Zune ....................................................... 85
Playing your music in the home................................................................ 87
Playing your music over the web with Orb ..................................................... 88
How do I get Orb to index my media? .......................................................... 90
Car MP3 players .............................................................................. 91
Playlists .................................................................................... 91
How to use manual and auto playlists.......................................................... 93
How to order the tracks in an auto playlist .................................................. 94
How should I manage my local playlist files? ................................................. 95
Reasons you‘re loving your music more after chapter 3 ........................................ 95

Chapter 4: Making Your Music Collection Work for You: Nick’s Picks and Recommendations

How do I convert my collection to MP3? ....................................................... 97
How should I synchronize my metadata between different media player software? ................ 98
How to synchronize playlists between different media players ................................ 102
Is it really okay to manage my music collection with one media player software application and 
sync my music collection to my PMP with another application? ................................ 103
Backup your music collection! ............................................................... 103
Putting it all together – how to really love your music ..................................... 105
Where can I find new music? ................................................................. 105
How can I use the occasion metadata tag? .................................................... 106
How can I do free-form metadata track tagging? .............................................. 106
Tagging dos and don‘ts ...................................................................... 108
Use strong metadata to create awesome playlists ............................................. 109
How to be a Dance Commander (create a great dance party) .................................... 110
How to make sure you (almost) always listen to music you like................................ 112
Reasons you‘re loving your music more now that you‘ve finished Love Your Music............... 112

Appendix

Review of Nick‘s Picks and recommendations .................................................. 115
One-time Checklists ......................................................................... 123
Ongoing checklists .......................................................................... 124
Glossary .................................................................................... 125
Suggested websites .......................................................................... 128
Photo credits................................................................................ 129

In Love Your Music you will find the best and cheapest places to legally get new music. Picture yourself six months from now. Your favorite artist has released a new album – and you just listened to it, the day it came out, for no additional charge using your favorite new music service.

Love Your Music will show you how to create a playlist in seconds. Picture yourself at your next New Year’s Eve party. It’s the best one you’ve ever thrown because you were able to create perfect party playlists as your guests requested them.

Download the Love Your Music eBook now!

About the author – Nick Martin

Nick Martin

Music Fan

First and foremost, I am a passionate music fan. I have a nearly 10,000 track digital music collection and own 200+ physical CDs (which isn’t all that many compared to some people I know). I like listening to recorded music and love going to concerts. I enjoy everything from catching small town acts at local venues to driving to the city to see bigger names play at clubs or arenas to caravanning to multi-day outdoor festivals. I have subscriptions to eMusic and Napster and I have a portable media player.

I like to listen to a variety of music from pop to country, ska and indie (independent label) rock to hip-hop and classic rock. That said, I need to have the music available for different situations, from motivating me while working on a project at work to fueling a dance party on a remote beach along a wild and scenic river. I need to have any of those
10,000 tracks available at most any time. That, in part, explains how I developed my MP3 knowledge.

It is safe to say that without music I wouldn’t get through my day. I love music!

Personal Experience

The emergence of the MP3 file format, cheap personal computers and the beginning availability of affordable broadband internet access all led to an explosion in digital music. I was a freshman in college in 1997. My campus dorm was a digital music free for-all. Trading music via FTP and the old, original, Napster meant access to huge volumes of free music. In these early days of digital music, songs were poorly organized – the music software was really dumb, but we didn’t care, because we were getting so much great music. Those players didn’t have any way of identifying a track’s artist, album, title or track number other than by getting it from a file name. Today’s players give you all of that information and more by reading the information from inside the file itself.

Over the past 14 years I have listened to music from my collection nearly every day. I also regularly create playlists for friends and for special events – parties, wedding receptions, and family gatherings. I also make playlists for when I’m just hanging out with friends. While I have the ability to utilize my metadata to create playlists, I hungered for more capability and for a way to make it easy for everyone to make playlists quickly.

In Love Your Music share which media player software I’ve used, which portable media players I’ve owned and which music services I’ve joined over the past 14 years.

Professional background

Digital music expert

I also have been fortunate enough to be exposed to digital music on a professional level. I am a software engineer by training (Electrical Engineering and Computer Science BS from the University of California at Berkeley) and at the beginning of my career had the opportunity to work in Digital Entertainment Services and related organizations in
Hewlett-Packard from 2000-2007. While at HP, I designed media software for projects that ranged from consumer desktop software, to Hollywood movie industry enterprise software. All of these projects involved digital media including photos, audio and video.

In order to make sure the engineers in the R & D lab were up to speed with the state of the art, we had the opportunity to use many music services and devices first hand – and get paid for it! This first hand experience, and the discussions with my colleagues that followed, provided me invaluable experience and insight.

Nick has a deep technical understanding of digital media products and standards. He understands the competitive marketplace, its players and offerings and he also understands the best-of-breed digital music solutions. While at HP, Nick used his knowledge to create cutting-edge digital media software solutions while in my research and development organization. Nick is highly qualified to provide guidance in digital music.

-- Michael Wilson, R&D project manager at Hewlett-Packard

Why I wrote this book

I gained knowledge that I assumed was common sense, but really I was just oblivious to how much of this knowledge I had absorbed compared to people whose lives weren’t focused on digital media. I have seen friends and relatives struggle managing their music collections. When I tried to find a comprehensive source of digital music knowledge and recommendations, to my surprise, I couldn’t find anything to pass on to my friends and relatives. Since no one else has done it, and even though I am working on other digital music projects, including a blog (LoveYourMusic.tv) I decided the time was right to write this book.

What others are saying about Love Your Music

Adam

Love Your Music allowed me to revive my old music collection! I acquired most of my music in the 90s, back when people first started using digital music. I had music in lots of different file formats and a lot of files with incomplete information (like missing artist name, genre, etc). As a result, it was hard to find the music I wanted to listen to. Love Your Music showed me how to clean up my music collection. Now I listen to what I want quickly and easily.

-- Adam, Corvallis, OR

Jason, Portland, OR

To a digital music novice like myself, Love Your Music provided an great overview of how to maximize my music experience. In particular I now understand the power of meta data to improve my playlist capabilities.

-- Tim Bouma, Corvallis, OR

Steve Hubbard, Lake Oswego, OR

Jim Martin, Netarts, OR

Download the Love Your Music eBook now!

At $9.99 Love Your Music is a great investment

Join others who have saved thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours by picking up your copy of Love Your Music.

Why this book is so much better than free content

It took years to compile the information in this book. While there is lots of information available online, much of it is inaccurate. No one website, book, video, podcast or other source consolidates all of this information in one place. Some of it is out there, but it's scattered across hundreds of different websites.

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Always listen to music you love by harnessing today's digital music technology.