Playing Music and More

Imagine coming home from work, kicking off your shoes and just settling down on your sofa with a remote in hand. Slowly you turn on your PC – yes, you heard right, your PC! Modern computers are not just about powerful computing abilities and speedy RAM but also about providing home entertainment features.

A suitably equipped PC will let you listen to music by playing CDs or an online radio, watch movies on DVDs or watch those you have downloaded from the Internet and completely manage all your digital images.

Playing Music

Often while working, we wish for some pleasant music in the background to keep our minds fresh and our spirits high. Invariably however, the music system is in some other room far from the computer room, making it difficult to select what songs you want to hear and making it difficult to play it so you can hear it clearly.

Now with your new PC, you can play any CD containing music with the same studio like quality. Just open the CD drive and place the CD you want to listen to in it. Most computers now come equipped with sophisticated media players that will instantly recognize the music CD and open up the player. This player will have all the relevant controls like volume, stop, pause, move to the next track and so on.

Playing CDs is a very simple and straightforward way in which you can use your PC to play music. Let us look at some other powerful ways in which you can listen to the very latest musical hits on the PC, without purchasing a CD – in fact without stepping out of your house!

CDs typically play digital audio files that are usually very large in size. However, using a file format called MP3, one can shrink this audio data to a very small size without affecting the quality of sound in the least. Such small files can be very easily shared over the Internet and downloaded at ease, with just a click of the button. You may find it interesting to know that a typical song runs to about 4 minutes or 4 MB of MP3 file. If you have a broadband connection, you can download this song in a few seconds.

If you search through the Internet, you will find many online stores selling the latest music in the form of downloadable MP3 files. For example, if you go to MTV.com, you can search for songs that you can download for free while there are plenty of others that you can download for a small charge. Once you download a song, you can listen to it as many times as you want or you can even email it to your friends with whom you share a similar taste in music.

Of course, to play MP3 files, you need an MP3 player. These are of two kinds – portable MP3 players like Apple’s iPod and software players like Windows Media Player. Most modern PCs come pre-installed with the Windows Media Player. So, as soon as you finish downloading a song, you can immediately listen to it on your PC. Another tremendous advantage of the PC is that you can transfer these MP3 files from the computer to the portable MP3 players. As a result you can listen to them even as you are on the move. Similarly, if you pick up some good music from friends on your portable MP3 player, you can transfer them from the player to the PC.

Thus, your PC is now not just a device to help you to listen to some music but a way of managing all your audio files, allowing you to seamlessly share them between different players.