CD Audio to MP3 Player

Factual Questions
1

Is it possible to get CD Audio onto a MP3 Player WITH OUT copying it to your computer’s hard drive?

There MUST be a faster way to do this;

Start Computer program.
Insert Disc
Copy Disc to “My Library” on Hard disk
Copy Music from “My Library” to Mp 3 Player.
Why can’t you just:
Start computer program.
Insert disc.
MP3 Player imports music INSTANTLY.
No hard drive space needed.

2

It’s very possible, just someone needs to write ripping software that writes directly to the mp3 device with its output.

3

My nephew just visited me and has a Sony PSP which holds MP3 files.
He wanted to burn some of my audio CDs onto it. We thought we would have to burn them onto my computer first but somehow the PSP (connected to my PC via USB) downloaded them as MP3 files directly from the CD-Rom drive.

So I guess it is possible.

4

If you have a player that your operating system sees as a removable drive, then it can be done right now, but all that’s going to happen is that the ripping program caches data on the device, before encoding it as MP3, rather than caching it on the main hard drive. I can’t see why anyone would consider this an advantage.

Another way to handle it would be to cache the intermediate stages in memory, even on a RAM disk (in fact you could set one up for this purpose), but again, why bother?

Or you could get an MP3 player that has a line input and record directly from one device to the other, but you’d be converting to analogue and back, incurring loss of quality.

But really, if all you want is a one-click rip-ultimately-to-removable-media, CDex will do this for you today; it will need to store its working files somewhere, but you needn’t necessarily concern yourself with that.

5

Because the music has to sit on your hard drive, however briefly, before it gets to the MP3 player.

You can get close to your ideal with Apple’s iTunes and an iPod:

  1. Buy an iPod, install iTunes.
  2. Configure iTunes to “rip CDs automatically when a disc is inserted,” and to sync (copy) all of your music to the iPod.

Thereafter,

  1. Run iTunes.
  2. Insert CD into computer. (music is automatically ripped)
  3. After CD is ripped, plug in iPod. (music is automatically copied)
6

Yes but… I guess speed of the computer (middle man) is the rub.

7

Some kind of processing is always necessary, simply because the music on the CD isn’t stored in anything like the same format as your MP3 player needs.

8

Processing is of course necessary, but the resulting MP3 data could conceivably go right to the MP3 device’s storage without hitting the PC hard drive. The ripping software would have to have good access to the device, of course.