Unless you have been living in a cave, you're sto have heard about MP3—the new digital music format that has taken the music world by storm. With the vast number of MP3 song software players, CD rippers, encoders and decoders available for free on the Web, MP3 is rapidly gaining popularity as the audio standard on the Net.

While the debate over the issues concerning the legality of music distribution on the Net rages on, MP3.com, the popular MP3 site, has gone ahead and introduced a new service for users all over the world. It's called ‘My.MP3.com and allows you to access your music collection anytime and anywhere. This includes the CDs you currently own CDs you buy online and your own music collections at MP3.com.

Let’s make the best of it and walk through the process of using the MP3.com service.

Create — an Account
It's as simple as clicking the Sign Up! Button on the MP3.com home page and specifying an e-mail address and a password. There—you're now ready to roll.

Start your collection
• The easiest way to get your online collection started is to surf the MP3.com site for the songs available there.
• When you find a song that you like, just click the Add to My MP3.com link next to the song and it's automatically added to your collection.

Beam it up !!
My MP3.com also allows you ‘beam’ i.e... register your CD tracks with your My MP3.com account so that you can listen to your favourite track any where around the world. This is achieved by matching the CD titles with the huge library compiled at their end. However, to do so, you need to use a software utility called as "Beam-it". This utility is (about 1.4 MB in size) is available for free on t he MP3 .com website (www. mp3.com).

Create a playlist
My MP3.com lets you create your own playlist to store music, categorised by artist, genre, or according to your taste. For example, you may want to create a Favourites' play list for easy access to your favourite songs. Just follow these steps to create your own, playlist :

• Select My PlayIists from the dropdown menu towards the left of the My MP3.com, screen.
• Click the Create button below to create a new playlist.
• Enter. the name of the list . ( e.g. "My Favourites") in the resulting popup window. Click OK.
• Your new playlist will appear in the playlist window. Now you can. edit your own songs to the playlist window

Adding songs to the playlist
Now that your 'My Favourites' play list is ready, here's how you add songs to it:
Select the playlist from the playlist window i.e. the category from where you want to add songs to your playlist.

• Click the associated check boxes to select the songs you want a add to your My Favourites playlist. To select all tracks,         click the select all button.
• Select the ‘My Favourite,’ playlist from the Copy selected to dropdown menu towards the bottom-right corner of the         screen to add songs to that playlist. Click the Add songs button.

Organise your playlist
You can organise the songs in your playlist to play your favourite soundtrack first. Here’s how :
• To organise your playlist select My Playlists from the dropdown menu.
• In the playlist window, select the playlist you want to organise.
• The different tracks from the playlist will be displayed.
• Click the up and down arrows to arrange the songs in the order in which you want to hear them.

You can also delete a playlist by selecting the playlist you want to delete and clicking the Remove list button. Following a similar procedure, you can also delete individual songs on your account.