Absolute Beginners Guide to Upgrading and Fixing Your PC

Application #3: Ripping Music from a CD

If you have a decent compact disc collection and a CD-ROM drive in your computer system, you can make your own MP3 or WMA files from the songs on your CDs. You can then listen to these files on your computer, download the files to a portable audio player for listening on the go, share them with other users via a file-swapping service, or use these files to burn your own custom mix CDs.

This process of copying files from a CD to your hard disk, in either MP3 or WMA format, is called ripping. You use an audio encoding program to rip your files; most of the major digital media players, such as Windows Media Player and MusicMatch Jukebox, also function as audio encoders.

note

In the MP3 format, the lowest acceptable bit rate for recording music is 96Kbps, which sounds similar to bad FM radio. If you prefer your tracks to sound more like good FM radio, go with the 128Kbps rate. Even better is the 192Kbps rate, considered by many to be near CD-quality. Discerning audiophiles should opt for either 256Kbps or 320Kbps recording both of which sound darned close to CD quality, with just the slightest amount of compression.

The ripping process is fairly simple. You start by inserting the CD from which you want to copy into your PC's CD-ROM drive. Then you launch your encoder program and select which songs on your CD you want to rip. You'll also need to select the format for the final file (MP3 or WMA) and the bit rate you want to use for encoding; the higher the bit rate, the better the sound quality. (And the larger the file size!) After you've set everything up, click the appropriate button to start the encoding process.

After you start encoding, the song(s) you selected will be played from your PC's CD drive, processed through the encoder program into a WAV-format file, encoded into an MP3- or WMA-format file (your choice), and then stored on your hard disk.

Here's the upgrade checklist:

Upgrade Checklist for Ripping Music from CDs

Fast (48X) CD-ROM drive (see Chapter 5)

40GB or larger hard drive (see Chapter 4)

Audio encoding software or digital media player with audio encoding features, such as Windows Media Player or MusicMatch Jukebox

caution

After you've started the encoding process, do not use your computer to do anything else while encoding; you may even want to disable any background applications, such as antivirus software. Any other use of your PC during encoding runs the risk of adding "skips" to your MP3s.

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