Music Album Downloads

Music Downloads are albums, packaged as MP3 files in a zip folder. These folders are designed for quick downloads on high speed internet connections. Your order music from Persona Digital Online, pay by Pay Pal, download, save the zip folder in a folder that contains your music files. In Windows click on the folder and choose the extract all option to unzip the files to your hard drive. A new folder containing the MP3 files will be created. The MP3 files will play on all computers, laptops, notebooks, smart phones, iPods,. iPads, CD and DVD players and all portable music players. Some albums contain liner notes or minibooks as PDF files that introduce the music  Be sure to save your downloaded PDF and music files in a folder that you can can find later.

Free Music Downloads are offered as music history, music appreciation, education and demonstrations of Persona Studio's arranging, recording and mastering techniques. All the recordings are completed in house by Stephen Gislason. The music selections and their history are explained in the book, Sound of Music.

More About Audio Files

The original digital audio files were large and video files were much larger. File compression involves hardware and/or software that reduces the file size. Compression requires compromises between storage space requirements, quality of reproduction and the cost of the hardware/software required to decompress in a reasonable time. A variety of compression  strategies have been used; two groups are recognized – the loss and that lossless referring to the acoustic information content of the file. Loss methods eliminate portions of the acoustic information based on psychoacoustic studies that revealed that some sound information was not perceived by the listener.

The software/hardware used to compress and decompress is a codec. Digital audio as wave files can be compressed to MP3, Window's WMA files or Apple's AIFF. The MPEG-1 codec is used for Video CDs and online video. This is most universal codec for video players. DVD movies are compressed with a higher quality MPEG-2 codec. The audio CD standard is a wav file sample rate of 44.1 kHz, a bit depth of 16  which runs at 1,411.2 k bits per second. A DVD standard has a file sample rate of 48 kHz, a bit depth of 24. The MPEG Advanced Audio Coding (AAC or MPEG-2) can use higher sampling frequencies ( 96kHz).  Listening tests demonstrated that AAC produces  slightly better stereo audio quality at 96 kb/s than MP3 at 128 kb/s.

The MP3 compression codecs changed the music industry simply because they reduced the size of audio files while retaining reasonable sound quality. The smaller audio files could be stored more efficiently in the memories built into portable music players and Smartphone's. MP3 files were quicker to download from internet sound libraries and music delivery from online sources threatened  other methods of music distribution. By 1997, the website mp3.com  offered thousands of MP3s created by independent artists for free. Peer-to-peer file sharing of music ripped from CDs and converted to MP3 became popular (Napster 1999.)   At Persona Studios, we use three MP3 compression targets expressed as Kbits per second : 128, 192 and 320. The MP3 files are used for downloads and online music players.