To rip ripped your music CDs to audio files on your computer, all it need is the CD drive and your physical collection ends up as digital music collection. You can further copy the music on to PC or to your smartphone, and there are several other free services that will let you store the music online and lets you stream from anywhere.
Get CD Drive
Few of the modern PCs and laptops are ebeing launched without any CD drives. But if your computer has the CD drive, then you can go on with process. You can also connect CD drives to a laptop or any PC.
Opt for ripping software
Opt for the ripping software and several programs you may use already have CD-ripping capabilities like iTunes on Macs and PC, which has a built in by default. Insert CD while iTunes runs and it will ask to “Import” the CD into iTunes, ripping the music on to digital files. Click Import Settings button to encode the settings in the iTunes Preferences window.
Launch the Windows Media Player and it lets you use the “Rip” button to rip the files on it to PC. But ensure you rip to WMA files and make certain to disable the copy protection, so that you don’t create DRM’d files which are limited in how you utilize them. Using iTunes or Windows Media Player will supposedly be fine, but if you want more advanced tools, then opt for Exact Audio Copy on Windows EAC, which incorporates advanced error correction. Download LAME MP3 encoder separately and provide it to EAC. Mac users can opt to Max, which also incorporates error-reduction features.
Opt for Format or Bitrate
Opt for format or bitrate when ripping discs. Various formats have different compatibility and MP3 is one of the best compatible ones while AAC is more efficient and creates smaller files at good quality.
Also select a bitrate or quality level for a the maximum sound quality but at larger files sizes. Example- FLAC and Apple’s Lossless Audio Codec (ALAC).
Tag Songs Automatically
iTunes has this built in a ripping program named “Automatically retrieve CD track names from the Internet” which allows you to detect the discs you’ve inserted, check them online and automatically fill in tags like artist name, album name, track title, release year et al for each of the songs. According to the program you opt to, you could tweak your metadata provider settings and confirm that program is automatically tagging the audio and this process is time-saving.
However, ensure to backup your music you’ve already ripped onto the external hard drive, since it will help you in not going through the entire process again if your hard drive gets in trouble of losing any of the files.
