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Tuesday, January 31, 2006
Ripping and running MP3s
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Immediately after Christmas, Geekboy fielded a number of calls about portable MP3 players and inflatable girlfriends.
I couldn’t help much with the latter, other than the usual advice of keeping her away from open flame, but I managed to help some of my technically-inept friends convert their CDs into MP3s.
Last week, we learned an MP3 is basically a smaller version of the music you find on a CD. Since the file size is typically a tenth as large, you can fit a lot more of them on a portable device.
Today we’ll discuss a legal method of acquiring MP3s – converting your existing stack of CDs into something you can slap on an iPod. Future blogs will explain how to download MP3s from various sources.
At the dawn of the digital age, the manufacturers of music CDs decided to store music in such a way that people could not easily copy it. So, instead of simply popping a CD in the computer and copying music like a normal file, you need a program that extracts or “rips� the songs.
The parlance is colorful, but misleading, because nothing is being ripped, you are simply “extracting digital audio� from the CD and usually converting it into an MP3 so the file size is reduced.
Most MP3 players come with ripping software. I have used a few and some are junk.
I have always used the free and wonderful CDex. This program has been around awhile and there are likely better commercial options available, but you can’t beat the price.
Using CDex is fairly straightforward, but since I get paid by the word I will keep typing.
CDex HowTo
Step 1) Download and install CDex. The program is very small, unlike a lot of bloatware you may be used to.
Step 2) Fire it up! The initial screen will look something like this if your CD drive is empty. We need to set a few things up so click the “Configure CD Settings� button that is indicated in the picture. You should NOT mess with the default settings unless you know what you are doing or are following these directions.
Step 3) Click to the Filenames tab where we will tell CDex where to save MP3s. You should change the two lines on the screenshot that say “c:\geekboy\�. The button to the right of the geekboy line with “…� on it will allow you to browse to the proper folder on your system.
Step 4) Click to the Encoder tab and find where it says “Bitrate Min.� This is where we set the bit rate of the MP3s we will be ripping. Most users will be happy with 128kbps. If you have the hearing of a dog you can select something higher, like 192kbps or 256kbps. Advanced users can change the “encoder� on this tab too for other file formats, but the default setting is the best for making MP3s.
Step 5) Go to the Remote CDDB tab and enter your e-mail address in the appropriate spot. You can enter a bogus e-mail if you are paranoid. The remote compact disc database is needed to automagically fill out the song’s artist and title fields.
Step 6) Click OK.
Step 7) Slap a CD in your CD drive. Wait a few seconds and the program will list how many songs there are on the CD and other basic info.
Step 8) Look over on the right-hand side of the screen and you will see a button that has a magnifying glass. Click it to activate the remote database magic.
Step 9) Voila! The remote database has done the heavy lifting for you and entered all the song title and artist information. Sometimes the CDDB will ask you to select an album because there is more than one database entry. Try to select the one in your language that has the fewest misspellings! If you have a very rare CD, the database may not find a match.
Step 10) To convert the whole CD into MP3s, click the second button from the top on the right-hand side. Other buttons allow you to convert selected songs or portions of songs. Feel free to explore. After a few minutes, the MP3s will appear in the folder you specified in Step 3.
Once you have ripped a CD down, check out the MP3 sound quality. If you need to make corrections, the time to do it is before you spend an afternoon creating MP3s that skip.
For playback, I prefer to use the free program WinAmp. You can use Windows Media Player but it is a bloated piece of junk.
CDex has been around awhile, but does the job for me. And for playing music on a PC, I have yet to find something better than WinAmp.
What programs do you use to make and play MP3s?
