Rip & Burn Basics - Comments

Great intro Bob. My wife used this technique to Rip her CD's but to MP3 format for her MP3 player. She then also made compilation CD's for her car (the car stereo could play MP3 CD's - many newer ones do)

The top freeware I've heard for ripping CD's is EAC, Exact Audio Copy. Audacity, also free, was recommended for tapes and records, though I use it for mic voice recording too. To use the old stuff, you need a cable from the player with an adapter to the Line In Jack on your sound card. I find it handy to leave it plugged in to the card so you can just patch in the player when you need it. No fishing around the back. You may have to turn the Line In Jack on in your mixer control panel (right click the taskbar speaker to access.)

And play with the source and input levels to get the signal below peaks. Unlike analog recording when you want to peaking a bit, you want to avoid peaks in digital recording.

I much prefer the control of Nero for burning and it comes with a ton of tools, so you get a specialty set of tools for managing audio CD's.

When I'm looking for some software I generally go to Source Forge pretty early in the process. That's what I did a couple years back when I wanted something to rip CDs. I found CDex a little free project for windows that does the task very nicely. The thing it doesn't do is burn cds, but thats never been much of a problem as I generally use nero, or CDBurnerXP Pro for burning.

CDex is pretty configurable and it features easy setup with something called a CDDB database. What this means to you is that when you put your Bon Jovi disk into the drive CDex recognizes it and pre-populates all the song titles and such for you. I imagine the others have something similar. You hit burn and there it goes. I think you can even configure to auto burn. I configure it to eject when it's done. I can burn all day at work without a hitch, just put the next cd in when the last one pops out.

It also has lots of custom things you can do. I've used various settings to get it to rip off of very scratched disks. You can also completely configure how it saves your music. I like a directory with artistname-album, but the stock is artistname(subdir)album. Sometimes I use it to compress speech files for my mp3 player where I don't need 320bps in stereo, just a small file. It converts back and forth between many popular formats.

Generally I make stock computer CDs with mp3s as they play fine in my Sony-5710 car deck. I fit about 11 albums on a disk, but then I use 320vbr (variable bit rate) which is pretty high quality. I could probably fit twice that at 128. The end result is my little CD case on the visor has enough music for an interstate road trip.

http://cdexos.sourceforge.net/

As a new subject of interest, I appreciate the quality intro. I hope that you will go on to write part II, which will cover books on CD. I recently picked up a title with 21 discs. My car does not have a CD player, but I thought I could easily rip the book to my PDA, or buy an MP3 player. But so far, I've had nothing but trouble. Microsoft Media Player will rip the CDs, but does not undertand the author and book title. Furthermore, it does not understand tracks numbered 1 to 22 on every single disc instead of song titles. So, how is this done?

EDITOR'S NOTE: Sounds like you will have to manually rename the tracks after ripping...

For anyone with a LOT of CD's who wants to get it done quickly - here's a service that will do it for you - http://www.ripshark.com/. I have no experience with them, so I cannot say how good their service is.

I recorded a song on my camera, and now I want to upload it to my computer. Is there a way to do that? Not only that, but once it's on my computer, is there a way for me to burn it to a CD?

EDITOR'S NOTE: Sure, plug your camera into the computer with the USB cable. Windows should recognize your camera as a hard drive, and you can copy the file to your C: drive. You can burn it to a CD just like any other file. Insert a writable CD, drag the file to the CD drive, and click burn.

I think my little sister got onto my laptop and burnt herself a CD with my music. To me this is very serious because she is constatnly stealing from everyone in the house. Is there any way to see when a CD was burnt last?

EDITOR'S NOTE: Doubtful, unless your CD burning software has some logging feature built in. A password on your laptop might be helpful.

I would like to add music to an artist myspace page. I have ripped the cd to my computer. but it says I need an mp3. What do I do?

EDITOR'S NOTE: If the file is not in MP3 format, you can convert it. You may even be able to change the options in your ripper to output to MP3 directly.

Hi Bob, I am wondering how i can convert avi videos files to mpegs files so i can record them to dvds for later use , is this possible or not, if so how.

EDITOR'S NOTE: There are some good free utilities to convert AVI to MPEG. Do a little searching on Google.

When adding music from CDs to my iTunes library, I have noticed that some of the converted tracks become slightly distorted, especially in the louder low end frequencies, and the higher high end frequencies. I have heard that this is always a problem with any conversion to a compressed audio file.
I have bumped the kbps rate up to 192 from 128 kbps, hoping the bigger file size would make for better fidelity, and I believe it does help some. I have been using the AAC encoder, but I notice there are a few other encoder choices for making the conversion. Is there a "best" choice for importing CDs to iTunes as far as fidelity goes? Any pros or cons for one encoder versus the others?

EDITOR'S NOTE: Use AAC and the highest bitrate, that should yield the best sound quality

Hi Bob, I could burn on to CDR before, but now it is not. I can burn onto cd rw fine. I have tried sony and wh smith cds and it only burns 2 songs and then stops. what can it be?

EDITOR'S NOTE: I'd swap out the CD burner, and see if that solves the problem.