Transfer CD music to your MP3 player
A quick guide to ripping CDs
With the holiday season having just passed, many have spent the last month or
two either enjoying a brand new MP3 player or being absolutely mystified
by its operation. Many MP3 players also come intertwined with a
music service, such as iTunes (with the iPod) or URGE (with the Zune); this could
lead many to believe that the only way to acquire songs for the player is
to download them via the player’s music service. This, of course, costs money,
and it could lead to people redownloading tracks they already own. Today,
we’re going to quickly take music on a good old CD and convert them to MP3
so iTunes, Windows Media Player, or any other program you might use can pick
them up and place them on your MP3 player.
The tools and what they do
For this process to work, you only need three things: a CD or DVD drive
on your PC, the CD you’d like to convert, and an excellent little program
called CDex (170b2_enu is the newest version at the time of writing).
CDex is short for “CD Extractor,” and does the job of converting music from the CD
format (Known as CDA), which are very large files, to much smaller and manageable
files like MP3 (most MP3 players), AAC (iPod) or OGG Vorbis (higher quality
than MP3, but most MP3 players don’t run it). To get CDex up and running,
simply run the installer; the only option you might change is the install
location, but the other options are pretty standard and are appropriate for
our purposes. Once CDex is installed, it’s time to configure the application.
Configuring CDEx
Launch the program and immediately head into the options menu at
the top of the screen, and configure the program as the following pictures
show:
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Make sure the file folder referenced in the “Recorded
Tracks” section is somewhere that’s easy for you to remember and
has lots of free hard drive
space to work with! All your newly-converted files will end up in this folder!
These are the default settings we’ll be using, which produces
a pretty high quality MP3 file. If you have an iPod, or an MP3 player that
also happens to support OGG, we’ll show you how to configure CDEx at the end of
the article for those specific purposes.
Configure the “Your E-mail address” as any bogus and worthless email
address you can think of. There’s no reason that you need to provide
your email for what we’re doing here. CDDB simply reads your CD and gives
the converted files the right track and artist names.
If I’ve skipped a tab in the configuration process, it simply means
that CDex is properly-configured in those tabs by default. Without further
ado, let’s pop that CD in, access CDDB for the album’s info, and rip it to
disk!
Ripping the CD: Converting CDA to a compressed music
format
With the CD in the drive, head to the top of the CDex program. Right beneath
the help button is a listing of CD or DVD drives installed in your computer, and
you should select which drive you’ve placed the CD in. In the main window,
you should now have a listing of tracks that as of yet do not have names or
an artist. It’ll look fairly similar to this:
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Now it’s time to give it its CDDB information, which can be
done with the magnifying glass button in the lower right hand corner of the
program. With any luck, the CDDB should be able to identify exactly what album
you have inserted, and if not, CDEx will present you with a couple options
which you need only match to the CD you actually have in the drive. In our
case, CDEx accurately identified our inserted CD as the King Crimson B’boom
Official Bootleg. Notice how CDEx automatically filled in the artist, album,
genre, year and track names for us. This track and artist info will be used
to give the songs we’re putting on our hard drives their names, so we won’t
manually have to do it. Pretty neat!
Now that we’ve got everything configured and named, it’s time
to put the files to the hard drive. To do that, simply click the second button
down on the right hand side: “Extract CD Track(s) to Compressed Audio
Files.” Doing this will fire up the conversion process which will take
a variable amount of time depending on the speed of your computer, but in
any case, it’ll look something like this:
And when the procedure is completed, you’ll have a fresh batch
of shiny new MP3 files on your hard drive to take on the go!
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Getting them to disk is always the hardest part, and now you’re
ready to get them onto the player. Unfortunately, the methods to import these
tracks onto your MP3 player are as numerous as the players themselves, but
consulting the user’s manual for the program you’re using will undoubtedly
tell you how to add new music to the program’s library, or otherwise import
the newly-ripped CD tracks into the application. And once you do that,
you’re finished! You’ve successfully moved your album to your player.
Have an iPod? Does your player support OGG Vorbis?
Earlier we mentioned that we’d come back and provide settings for
people who carry players from Apple, or have OGG Vorbis audio support. In
the case of the former, the iPod handles all of its music in the Apple-native
AAC audio format, which is similar to MP3 in form and function, but pretty
specific to the Macintosh/iPod platform itself. In the case of the latter,
OGG Vorbis was an open-source movement to make a monetarily and licensing-free
alternative to the MP3 format which is owned by Thomson Consumer Electronics.
Technically speaking, anyone who wants to make a program capable of encoding/decoding
MP3 must pay a small licensing fee to use the MP3 technology, although the
prevalence of the MP3 file as a de facto standard has, unfortunately, cast
this by the wayside. OGG, therefore, has none of these restrictions and can
be freely used by almost anyone for virtually anything! The downside, however,
is that OGG Vorbis files aren’t commonly-supported. However, for you iTuners
or Vorbis-lovers, here are some quick changes to the CDEx options menu that
will let you rip your CD in better (Or a more appropriate) format:
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Back in the encoder options menu for CDEx, we’ve changed the
encoder type from MP3 to the Astrid/Quartex AAC Encoder. This will produce
iPod/iTunes-compatible music without making iTunes reencode your MP3 files,
which will reduce the resulting playback quality.
In the same menu as the AAC options, we’ve changed the program to use the
OGG Vorbis DLL Encoder, which will produce .OGG files for
our consumption. OGG is argued to be higher quality than MP3 at the same bitrates
(192kbps for example) , and is a good option if your player
supports it.
No other options need to be changed to produce AAC or OGG files.
CDEx will still take care of naming the files via CDDB, they’ll still be placed
in the same location you selected when you were initially configuring CDEx,
and they’ll still sound very much like the original CD they were produced
from.
Wrap Up
Many people are mystified by the process of getting music from a
CD onto an MP3 player (In fact, this article was inspired by the author’s
mother’s recent struggles to do just that), but it couldn’t be easier, and
it’s actually quite quick. The best part is that once you’ve configured CDEx
the first time, you only need to follow the steps from the “Ripping
the CD: Converting CDA to a compressed music format“
section from there on out.
Happy playing! 
