Ripping CD's

[gkitching]

What program do you use?

I've always just used Windows Media Player to convert music CD's to MP3. Cataloging was never a big deal. I didn't do it that often.

Here's the thing ... I've been ripping Audio Books lately and Windows Media Player just makes a mess of keeping things in order. I assume the program is trying to organize the files based on author and title. Though it seems the audio books aren't consistent from one cd to the next one. And I think it may be because of the chapter info of the book vs track number. or whatever. Regardless, it makes for a nightmare of a time re-organizing the files manually. Some of these audio books are 20 CD's long.

Any suggestions on good FREE programs that might be easier to use and/or be able to title things before the ripping process starts? Or maybe there's a way to do that with the Windows player that I don't know about. Any help would be great!

[dBincognito]

What program do you use?

I've always just used Windows Media Player to convert music CD's to MP3. Cataloging was never a big deal. I didn't do it that often.

Here's the thing ... I've been ripping Audio Books lately and Windows Media Player just makes a mess of keeping things in order. I assume the program is trying to organize the files based on author and title. Though it seems the audio books aren't consistent from one cd to the next one. And I think it may be because of the chapter info of the book vs track number. or whatever. Regardless, it makes for a nightmare of a time re-organizing the files manually. Some of these audio books are 20 CD's long.

Any suggestions on good FREE programs that might be easier to use and/or be able to title things before the ripping process starts? Or maybe there's a way to do that with the Windows player that I don't know about. Any help would be great!

Nero, is free and easy.....besides that WMP turns all your songs into WMA files....yuck

[fuzzysnuggleduck]

I use iTunes. Works well and it makes it easy to manage all your media.

[stipud]

Disk Utility.... buuuuuuuuut that's a mac program v:?v

[Francious70]

I've always manually managed my music organization when ripping CD's. When downloading mp3's I let the Media Player take care of it.

[gkitching]

Ya music is no problem I think mainly because each song has a different title where as the audio books have the same title on each track so I guess the next order of relevance is chapter then track .. I don't know it's just driving me crazy.

Tom .. as usual you're a great help with PC questions

db .. I used to have Nero like 2 machines ago. It wasn't that great back then. Tho I can't say what it's like now. Maybe worth a look again.

Fuzzy .. I do have I-Tunes program loaded for my daughters I-Pod. However I've got it in my head that I'm anti-anything I-pod. I think mainly because of how restrictive it is. But for no better reason really. Will the I-tunes program convert to MP3? Or does it just do ACC files? Because I have standard MP3 players for playback of these audio books.

[fuzzysnuggleduck]

Fuzzy .. I do have I-Tunes program loaded for my daughters I-Pod. However I've got it in my head that I'm anti-anything I-pod. I think mainly because of how restrictive it is. But for no better reason really. Will the I-tunes program convert to MP3? Or does it just do ACC files? Because I have standard MP3 players for playback of these audio books.

iTunes will rip to MP3.

Here's a PCmag article about using iTunes to rip Audiobook CDs:

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,1846814,00.asp

And this:

http://oakroadsystems.com/genl/itunsabk.htm

[bretti_kivi]

.. and iTunes is mac software.

Try MP3Tag or Foobar2000. If you need a real guide.... I can provide, just not right now.

Bret

[dwnrodeo]

I know you may be anti iTunes/iPod, (so was I) but it really seems to be the best that I've encountered for ripping CD's. Plus it will run on a PC.

[Bfowler]

i have always used WMP, and it DOES have an option to rip it to mp3 instead of wma

[dBincognito]

Personally I use a program called Wavelab. It's far more advanced

[stipud]

Ah geez, I didn't even read your question. I thought you were trying to rip/burn exact copies of the CD. That's what I use Disk Utility for.

I like iTunes, but I hated it at first. The only thing that makes it unwieldy to use is that it's tied in heavily with the ID3 tags (information embedded in the MP3's) to organize your songs. If you have good clean ID3 tags, iTunes will keep the music library very organized, and you can find stuff quickly.

Fortunately when you import new CDs, it contacts CDDB (cd database) and gets all the relevant ID3 information for you. In that case, most of your stuff is organized already, as you import it, though you may need to make small modifications to things like to genre, in order to fit your library.

I have my whole collection sorted Genre -> Artist -> Album... makes everything a breeze to retrieve. No shitty playlists or browsing through folders of manually organized songs. Bah! So it takes a bit of organizing at first, but once you've got clean ID3 tags, iTunes can be very powerful to use. Having your iTunes organized also makes an iPod equally easy to use... you probably won't find it restrictive after that.

So it's restrictive in the sense that it forces you to organize things a certain way. However, this makes it far easier to use. Even with 60gb of various music, it only took me an afternoon to get everything perfectly organized when I first switched to iTunes. It's been super nice since then.

[Francious70]

What I hate most about the way iTunes organises imported CD's if if the song has someone featured on a song it will put that individual song in it's own folder and label it differently than the rest of the album in the library making it a bitch to find sometimes. That grinds my gears.

[bretti_kivi]

Foobar and MP3Tag rocks. I can't really tell you why I detest iTunes... I simply haven't tried it and don't want my collection administered by a program, thanks. I already have way too many discs but they're generally consistent.

Foobar: put a CD in. Click "open audio CD", then click "rip".
Select the Information store at the bottom (CDDB is pretty good), hit "lookup". It should filll out the album and track info.

Now click "go to the converter setup dialog"

You can the select the output directory, the file format and the quality used. These days, I use FLAC at level 3. Hit "OK" to start.

MP3Tag will tag anything and everything.

Bret

[dwnrodeo]

What I hate most about the way iTunes organises imported CD's if if the song has someone featured on a song it will put that individual song in it's own folder and label it differently than the rest of the album in the library making it a bitch to find sometimes. That grinds my gears.

I agree. I also had problems with iTunes making several artist folders for the same band, even though they were named EXACTLY the same. A minor annoyance but still there.

[fuzzysnuggleduck]

What I hate most about the way iTunes organises imported CD's if if the song has someone featured on a song it will put that individual song in it's own folder and label it differently than the rest of the album in the library making it a bitch to find sometimes. That grinds my gears.

Technical blurb:

That's a result of the fact that CDDB usually returns songs that feature another artist with "feat. XXXX" in the Artist field of ID3 tag instead of the Track field. If you make those discs a "compilation", iTunes will store them together but that's not appropriate or convenient. The solution I would like if to put the "feat. XXXX" in the track name field instead of the artist field.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDDB

Edit: Sony owns Gracenote which was previously CDDB Inc. Gross.

[Bfowler]

What I hate most about the way iTunes organises imported CD's if if the song has someone featured on a song it will put that individual song in it's own folder and label it differently than the rest of the album in the library making it a bitch to find sometimes. That grinds my gears.

TIMES ONE MILLYON

[stipud]

What I hate most about the way iTunes organises imported CD's if if the song has someone featured on a song it will put that individual song in it's own folder and label it differently than the rest of the album in the library making it a bitch to find sometimes. That grinds my gears.

TIMES ONE MILLYON

Group by Compilation

You might have to label it as a compilation in the ID3 tags. Just select all of the songs on the album, get info, and add a common compilation name. Then it will all be grouped. You will still have the artists showing up separately though.

Or you can do what I do and override the name to be the artist name or if it's a mix just "Various Artists" because I don't like having single artists to browse through. Again, you can group edit tracks, so just select the whole labum, get info, and change the artist name to be consistent. Problem solved.

Edit: oops Ryan already got it. Me not so on the ball today.

[Francious70]

Yea, I know how to fix it, it's just annoying that I even have to. This is 2009 for God's sake, arn't computers supposed to be smarter than that?

I mean, if one can hunt Sarah Conner, then surely they can figure out that songs from the same album belong in the same directory.

[wash with gasoline]

i like itunes, the only things that bug me are the splitting up featured artists to diff folders. that it puts albums in compilation folders when it makes no sense sometimes, example tool opiate. on live mix cds from djs you have to use the search bar to get them in one place because it files them under the original artists, and if you have the same song used by diff djs you end up with a bunch of duplicates when you are just scrolling down your library. the fact that itunes does not support flac and never will, they have apple lossless but its only usable on ipods last i checked. if you are running a pc itunes takes forever to load and uses a bunch of memory to run. but its not anywere near enuf to put me off of itunes. i have 400 gigs of music and i dont have any clue how i would keep it organised without itunes. cover flow rocks. the options how to rip cds are great minus the no flack support, but you can just convert them back and forth between apple lossless with third party programs and you dont loose anything. if itunes wasnt around winamp would be what i would use, it plays apple lossless and flac and all the other formats, you can manage your ipod with it and pull music off of your ipod without going threw the look for hidden folders husstle.

[bretti_kivi]

.... and what if you don't have an ipod? I see no reason to use it whatsoever. I have flac and ogg on my phone and on my daughter's player... no apples in this house.

For Foobar it's a bit more difficult to rip, but not much. And you can add any strange codec you like... that it's open source appeals.

Bret

[fuzzysnuggleduck]

.... and what if you don't have an ipod?

Since pretty much every other player out there is just "drag and drop" to put your files on it, you can just drag over the folders iTunes creates. But that's the thing about iTunes/iPod, the forced syncing might be seen as limiting to some people but I see it as a huge time savings. I don't have to futz about transferring whatever around and making sure it's there. If I add stuff to iTunes, I just plug in the iPod, hit "Sync" and I'm sure my files are on there in the exact same way. I don't have to hunt around for them and drag them over.

Is iTunes/iPod perfect? Of course not.

[gkitching]

It says in that article Fuzzy posted, that i-tunes can only do the group thing with ACC files and not mp3. Is that correct or did I read it wrong?

Oh and to clarify, I won't be using an I-pod to listen to these files just standard MP3 players.

[fuzzysnuggleduck]

It says in that article Fuzzy posted, that i-tunes can only do the group thing with ACC files and not mp3. Is that correct or did I read it wrong?

Oh and to clarify, I won't be using an I-pod to listen to these files just standard MP3 players.

That's correct. It won't be able to join the separate files (tracks) created into a single large file (track) unless you use AAC as iTunes cannot stitch together MP3 files, only AAC.

[wash with gasoline]

if the payers you plan to use support mp4 files it will work, aac = mp4 apple just calls it something diff.