Q: How do I create an account?
A: Accounts can be created at any time using the “create account” link on the top of each page, near the log in text box.

Q: How do I unzip my files? or: "Help! the files are not playing!
A: For this you will need unzipping software. We recommend a free program called IZarc (available here), which is considerably more powerful than commercial alternatives such as WinZip. In order to unzip a file, you 1.) Right click on the Icon of the zipped file you wish to open. 2) In the menu that appears, move your mouse over the words "IZarc". 3.)From the submenu, select "Extract Here". That's it!
You can also double click the file to view the contents, and drag and drop them into a folder to unzip them.

Q: How frequently is new material made available?
A: Material is regularly added on Sunday mornings, 7:00 AM NY time.

Q: Are there any regular sales or discounts?
A: Please check back at this post soon, as we are working on a number of regular promotions, such as new - arrival specials.

Q: Is this site legal? Do the copyright holders get paid when we buy a song on Nigunim?
A: Absolutely!! All sales made on Nigunim are 100% legal, and all sales are being done on behalf the lawful copyright holders.

Q:Is it permitted to copy music to share with friends?
A: No. While signing up, you make an agreement regarding what may be done with music you purchase. We have attempted to be very fair so that you can use it in every way that would be practically included in normal use. This includes creating a backup, running it on two computers simultaneously, and streaming it throughout your house, etc.. We trust that the user will not steal this music, and will not be looking for ways to take advantage of our trust.

Q: But, isn't there a heter for copying digital music?
A: In order to insure that there should be no confusion, we have included a number of tnaim inside the contract. The way it stands ALL poskim worldwide agree that there are absolutely no heterim to copy our files.
This does not not mean that files cannot physically be copied - they can, but if you copy it, you are a thief, and if you use a file that a friend copied, you are using stolen goods, as well as aiding and encouraging gneiva. Many people have worked long and hard to create this music, and they are not moichal, not even on one track, and not even from your brother or brother-in-law, and not even if there is no-way that you are going to buy the album anyhow. Please bear in mind that while this may not seem so important to you, Gneiva is an issur d'Oraisa, and even if it doesn't seem like such a big deal now...

Q: What software should I use to play back music on my computer?
A: There are a countless number of music players on the internet, but the following free players are the most noteworthy (Click on the title to see the download page):

1. iTunes, RealPlayer, Napster, MusicMatch, and Yahoo! MusicEngine, are all very popular software for organizing, playing, burning and everything else you can do with your music.  (They are all affiliated with non – Jewish online stores, but one may use their music without ever accessing the stores.)  These players will also catch music that is not downloaded correctly, which can save you some heartache.  We strongly recommend that you use one of these players, as they will greatly unlock the potential of your music.
2. Windows Media Player comes installed on your computer, and is slow, difficult to use, heavy on resources, and will not organize your music.  It has also been associated with several security gaps, and with collecting personal data.
   Nonetheless it will be necessary to use for files that have been DRM’d, such as our streaming radio and music bought from other online services.  If you wish to use this player, please consider upgrading to version 11.
3. WinAmp is a very popular stand alone player that has most of the negatives of Windows Media Player, but is smaller, and has slightly better playback sound quality. Although it does tote some customization features not available elsewhere, we do not recommend it unless you are comfortable with using media software.  
4. CoolPlayer is a small standalone player that does nothing but play music.  However, it is very small, opens quickly, and uses about half of the resources that the Windows Media Player does.  The sound quality is similar to that of Win Amp's.  You may consider installing and using this alongside one of the other payers mentioned above in #1.
5. Nero and Roxio are not freeware, but they do sport internal media players.  Only recommended if you will anyways be purchasing one of these fantastic programs. 
   Later we will discuss other options for playback.

Q: Is there a way to play my MP3s on a home stereo?
A: There are several ways to play your MP3s through your existing home stereo.  
The easiest is to burn your mp3s to CD and play those CDs in your stereo system.  Most modern stereo systems support CDs full of MP3s, but even if your’s does not it is easy to convert your MP3s to regular files.

However, to truly unleash the power of your digital music collection, it is worth setting up a “Network Music Player”.  Network music players are small (~3 lbs) devices meant to connect your computer to your stereo, and allow you to listen to your entire collection from anywhere in your home.  They can be connected wirelessly or by cable, and usually come with a remote control for maximum ease.
We recommend that you use the Roku SoundBridge together with the Linksys WRT54G (About $200 together).  They are powerful, work well together, and are easy to setup and use.  The Roku comes preconfigured for use with iTunes and Musicmatch, has excellent sound quality and a intuitive remote control that allows you to browse your library from your bedroom. [Note: Roku also makes an advanced model, the M1000, that supports other formats aside from MP3].

1. Make sure your computer has a network card. Most computers, even older computers, have one.  To check, look in the back of your computer for what appears to be an oversized telephone jack (picture).
2. If you will be using the stereo in the same room as the computer, you can connect the network player directly to the network card using a “crossover Ethernet cable” (available in any computer store, but comes with many network players).
3. If you wish to listen to the music in a number of rooms, or just further from the computer than cables will reach, you will need to buy a wireless router. A wireless router is a device designed to wirelessly connect your computer with other devices.
   The router is plugged into the network card and broadcasts a signal directly to the network player (or, if you wish, a number of network players).
   While there are many brands of routers and network players, many are not compatible with each other, so check before you buy.
4. Setup iTunes for sharing: 1. Select Edit/Preferences.  2. In the dialog box that appears, click the "Sharing" tab.  3. Verify that the Share My Music option to enable sharing on your local network is selected.

Q: How do I convert normal music files to MP3 and back again?
A: We recommend a free program called “Lamedrop”, available here. 

The program is easy to use:  Double click to open a small box labeled “Drop Files Here” (there is no installation required), then drag and drop your files into that box to convert them.  Normal files will be made into MP3s, and MP3s will be made into WAVs.  It is fast, and uses the most powerful encoding engine available to regular home users. (jewishmusic.net uses advanced resources that can produce sound quality up to 120% better than any other technique, but these are not designed for home use.)

Although popular players such as iTunes and MusicMatch are also able to convert MP3s, they are more difficult to use, and their encoding engine is not comparable to the one used by Lamedrop.

The download is zipped, so you should unzip it before the first use.  (If you are not sure how, click here.) 
The default settings should be fine for most, but advanced users can change them at any time by right clicking on the “drop files” box.

Lastly, even though it is possible to trans-code an unlimited number of times, we strongly advise against doing so.  Each time a file is converted to MP3, the sound quality degrades
slightly, so a file that is converted to MP3 and then back to a WAV, will not sound as “pure” as the original.

Q: Is there a way to put (“burn”) my MP3 collection onto a disk?
A: Absolutely.  There are a number of good programs designed to do this, so here are a few notes:
I believe the most reliable and simple free program is Burrrn, which is available here:
With Burn, you can drag and drop tracks to burn, or use the intuitive options.

However almost all of the players listed above have the ability to burn CDs, including iTunes, Napster, Real Player, and MusicMatch.  The instructions for each are more or less the same, so we will use iTunes as an example.  Here are the step by step instructions to copy a playlist to CD with iTunes, copied directly from Apple’s site:

1. With iTunes open, insert a blank CD into your computer
2. Select the playlist you want to copy to CD. Before burning your CD, you can rearrange the songs by dragging them to different positions.
3. At the bottom of the iTunes window, check the size of your playlist to make sure it does’t exceed the amount of space on a CD.
4. Click the Burn button to begin copying the songs from your computer to the CD. You can watch the progress in the iTunes window.
5. When the files are copied, a CD icon will appear in the iTunes Source list.
6. Click the Eject button to eject your CD.

Alternatively, there are two popular propriety software titles that can take care of all of your music related needs.  They are:
Nero Ultra ($69) and Roxio Easy Media Creator ($77).

Between the two, I strongly recommend Nero, which is well worth the money for anyone who uses his computer heavily, even if you do not have audio / video needs.

Q: What is an MP3?
A:   An MP3 is a song (or "track") stored in popular format used for music files. The short explanation is: When you buy a CD, the music is encoded using a format called "Wav' This method produces excellent sound, but the files are very large. Since it would not be practical to download or store such large files on your computer, music is distributed in other formats such as MP3, WMA and AAC which produce much smaller files. To get a better picture, read on.

Q: OK, so what’s a file format?
A: A file format is a particular way to encode information for storage in a computer file. 

Meaning, that all digital information is really just a long (very long) string of “0”’s and “1”’s.  Somehow, by stringing them all together, your computer is expected to show you a song, a picture, or a priceless copy of some important legal document. Since the rules for how each file is written is made up by the creators of the software that wrote it, the computer just appends a three letter extension to each file that tells it which program made the file, and therefore knows how to decode it.  For example, All Microsoft Word documents end off with the extension “.doc”, nearly all pictures end off with the extension “.jpg”, and most web pages end with “.html”.  If you changed the extension on a picture to “.txt”, your computer would try to open the photo using Microsoft Notepad, and the result would be completely unintelligible.

[If you can’t see these extensions, Windows is hiding them.  You can make them visible as follows: 1. Press the WindowsKey and the letter “E” at the same time. 2. In the menu on top, click on “Tools”, and then on “Folder Options”   3. Press the "View" Tab   4. Uncheck the box labeled “Hide extensions of known file types  5. Press “OK”. ]

Q: How is an MP3 different than a regular CD?
A: All music also has to follow the same guidelines of how to be created, so that the players can know what rules to use to play it back (see last question).  By far, the two most popular formats for encoding music are Microsoft Wave, (extension “.wav”) and Fraunhofer Mpeg Layer 3, (extension “.mp3”). 

When you buy a CD, the music is recorded in a format very similar to WAV, and the computer treats it as a WAV file.  [Technically, it uses a format called Red Book.  (Called thus since the technical specs come in a $5000, red colored, book.)]  This format is uncompressed, easily modified, and can accurately reproduce music the way it was recorded.  It also takes up a tremendous amount of space – an average CD is well over half a GigaByte.  For comparison, most new computers only come with about 32 GB of empty space!!
MP3’s, on the other hand, are much smaller, usually storing a song in about a tenth of the space that a WAV would take.   The way they do this is twofold:

1. They compress the file.  In simple terms, let’s say that you wrote a document, and told the computer that every time you write the letter “T”, it is as if you wrote the word “this”.  Obviously, the file would be a little smaller.  Compression is basically the same – it finds common string of ones and zeros, and replaces them with shorter standard strings, that can later be decompressed.
2. They discard all the data that you can’t hear.  Imagine it going through the song making guesses.  “Hmm, humans can’t hear silence – let’s dump it.   They can’t hear sounds that are very high pitched - drop ‘em.  They probably won’t notice if we remove the drums from the backgrounds of a loud song – out it goes.” On and on.  Well, obviously this is very dangerous – its gotta take a lot of guesses.  Nonetheless, it does a really good job.  The proof is, that on professionally converted material, you really can’t hear the difference. 

However, just because a file is an MP3 does not mean the sound quality is similar to the original.  There are lots and lots of algorithms and compression rates out there.  MusicMatch uses one called “Xing” (low quality), and iTunes uses an old form of Faunhoffers (even lower quality).  When you realize the decisions it’s making, you realize that there can be a substantial difference in how the encoded file will sound.

Q: So, what are WMA, AAC and OGG?
A: These are three other music formats that have a substantial following. 
WMA is short for “Windows Media Audio” (Guess who created the format) and is commonly associated with DRM.  WMA DRM files will only play in Windows Media Player, or a few supported players.  They can only be moved onto a tiny percentage of portable MP3 players.  They cannot be played on the iPod.  It is a format that uses a lot of resources (lower battery life), and whose algorithm is considered inferior to MP3’s as far as sound quality.  However, it is popular since the DRM it offers is able to restrict all but the most dedicated Ganavim from making and distributing illegal copies to friends. 
In a few instances, we at Nigunim are restricted from distributing files that have no DRM, and in those cases we offer only WMAs.  Otherwise, we trust you not to steal or distribute copies, and we feel that the DRM is not necessary. (This subject is discussed further here, so I will not elaborate)
 
AAC (Advanced Audio Codec) is the extension of Apple’s format.  The sound quality of AAC files is far better than that of WMA, and may even be better than MP3’s.  However, they can only be played on one program – iTunes, and in one portable player – the iPod. If not for the fact that these two make up about 70% of all players, it would’t even be mentioned here.  No online store offers music in AAC except the iTunes store, however you can make AAC files using the iTunes player.

OGG, or Ogg Vorbis, is a format that has virtually no player support and I doubt you will ever see it.  It is the format associated with Linux.  It is mentioned only because the sound quality of OGG files is better than any of the competition, so if you are ripping CDs for your own use, you should consider using it.  The Ogg Converter is available here, and the player here.

Q: What are ID3 tags, and why should I care about them? aka. Why is it that "homemade" MP3s do not show up correctly in iTunes?
A: All encoded files have a few bits of space, called ID3 tags, in which information about the file can recorded.  Examples of that info are the name of the song, the name of the album, and a picture of the albums cover.  All modern players (including even Windows Media Player) are able to read some of those tags, and will display and organize the songs according to that data. 
As it works out, there is very little consistency between players as to which tag to read, and therefore sometimes different players will display different information.  However, if this ever happens with a song you have downloaded from us, please notify us immediately, as we try hard to ensure that all tags are as consistent as possible.

Q: Is there any way that I can edit my ID3 tags?
A: Yes, there is.  Although players such as iTunes have internal tag editors, we recommend that you use IDFree, which is available here.
This is a small reliable editor for almost all tags.  It is intuitive, and can batch convert an entire library at once.

Be aware though, that there are some tags that can not be changed.  For example, when you create or download MP3s, your computers IP address or identifier often gets added to a part of the tag that cannot be edited.  This can be useful if you ever have to prove that you are the legal purchaser of a song, and that you have not misused your rights.  Other examples are the type of encoder used, or the sample bitrate.  While these tags cannot be changed, they will not bother you either, as they are not visible in any of the popular players.

Q: I downloaded a song, and now I can’t find it!
A: When purchasing a song, your computer will ask you where you wish to save it.  If you are not sure what you answered, or otherwise moved the file and are not sure where, we recommend you do a search for the name of the song.  To begin searching your computer press the Windows Key (the button with the symbol:) and the letter “F” at the same time, or click on the word “Search” in the start menu.
I you use a player such as iTunes, the path to the file will be automatically saved during downloading, so just open your player and look for the title to play it.

Q: In what format do are songs?
A: See above.  Unless otherwise specified all songs are in “mp3” format.  In a few instances we are restricted from distributing the mp3, and in those circumstances the song will be in WMA format, with DRM protection applied.