I know this is probably embarrassingly simple, but I have to admit I don’t know how to do it.
When I open a music CD in Windows Explorer all I see are files that end with “.cda”,
These files are all only 1kb so they can’t be the actual music files.
So fight my ignorance Dopers – how do I accomplish what seems like it should be a very simple task?
BTW -I’m not pirating anything here – these are my CD’s – I just want to be able to listen to them without changing the disk so often.
You need to get a program that will rip your CDs to the hard drive. There are many that will do this for you.
Windows media player will do it.
I personally use CD ex.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/cdexos/
I have also used audio grabber.
http://www.audiograbber.com-us.net/
All of those options will work and you can configure them to compress the songs into mp3s or wma or acc etc. They all will also look up song titles in online databases thus saving you the tedious typing of all those song names.
You just want to store the music on your computer, right? The most common method is to convert the music into MP3 files. There are many software available for this - iTunes, MusicMatch Jukebox, CDex, etc. (I usually use CDex to make the MP3 files and import them into iTunes for management, playback and transfer to my iPod. iTunes can make MP3 files too, but CDex allows better control over compression settings.)
You need a CD ripper. Nero is good but apparently not free. Fortunately there are plenty others out there. I’ve only used Nero so maybe someone else can recommend something. I recommend one that can also convert the files to mp3s so you don’t have to download another program to do that. Happy listening.
The state-of-the-art in accurate digital extraction is Exact Audio Copy. It’s freeware, and requires only a little bit of configuration. It will extract CDs to .wav, or with external codecs, .mp3, .shn, .ape, .flac or what-have-you. It measures the read offset of your drive and sets it to give you an exact duplicate of what is on the disc.
Thanks for the help everyone!
I just downloaded the latest version of Windows media player and I’m all set (Ireally only need a basic solution).
Thanks again!
This seems like a solution in need of a problem. Of the 500 or so CDs in my collection I have had no issue with any of them. Is this something you had problems with fishbicycle?
Zoid let us know how windows media player works.
gazpacho, I don’t understand the tenor of your comments or question. Of the 4200 CDs in my collection, I’ve never had a problem, either.
EAC was written by a programmer in Germany to correct the faults of every other digital extraction program on the market, and to add features that many of them do not offer. There are Volkswagens and there are Porsches. Both are rides to work; one is a much nicer ride to work, because the maker cared to pay attention to small details.
I went to your link. It says.
Impling that there is a problem with the other ripping programs. They don’t make exact rips of CDs. I was mostly commenting that I did not think that this was a problem. All of the rippers will rip the CDs the same.
No, all rippers won’t rip CDs the same. The guy explained it (somewhat poorly) in the text you quoted. There is a forum for users of this program, with users numbering in the thousands. In my line of work, which requires exact duplication of CDs, this is the program we use. It has been thoroughly tested and documented and compared to all other extraction programs. It wins, hands down.
I bought Audiograbber. It sucked. The support sucked. I wouldn’t use WMP for anything except viewing .wmv files. RealPlayer is spyware. Other programs do not have the facility to test and copy, comparing CRCs with each pass. They don’t do gap detection. They don’t do offset computation or correction. They do not have an online library with the specs for every CD drive on the market, with the ability to configure itself for your drive. EAC does. That’s why we use it.
Maybe I’m confused, but if CD drives are error-prone enough to cause problems for normal ripping programs, then how the hell does my computer ever install a program off a CD?
Surely you are just copying, bit for bit, the information off the CD? It doesn’t matter whether those bits represent Microsoft Word, Doom or Justin Timberlake’s latest. (I’m not talking about re-encoding, eg to MP3 here, just straightforward ripping.)
If the ripping process is not copying those bits faithfully, then surely installing programs would be impossible, becuase even a tiny bit error, which you would never notice in music, would corrupt the program data.
What am I missing here?
It works just fine for my purposes, but like said I was really only looking for a very simple solution. I just open WMP, rip the CD and I’m all good. The playback sounds just fine to me but I wouldn’t have any idea how it stacks up for professional use.
The .cda files don’t actually exist, except in the imagination of the Windows operating system; they are virtual files created on the fly, for some reason or other that I used to know, but was far too dull to remember.
Another vote for CDex here; it does the job very well and can handle normalisation of the resulting digital audio files too (so they will all play at similar volumes, regardless of how loud they sounded on the original CD). I’m told that Windows Media Player can also do this, but a)I find it buggy, bloated and unstable and b)I wouldn’t trust it not to snitch me to Microsoft for ripping CDs.
What, no one likes iTunes? 
If you have an iPod, just use iTunes. One good thing about iTunes is that it fills in the metadata for you, and does so automatically. I know it’s a bit bloated, but sometimes you just want the simplicity of putting in the disc and hitting “rip”.
I decided I should test a few cd ripping programs to see if in fact they produced different output. I tried Windows Media Player, Audio grabber, CDex and exact audio copy.
Windows Media player did not have an obvious way to rip to wave files. The options I found were windows lossless, WMA, and mp3. With no easy way to rip to wave files I did not test WMP.
Audio grabber. This was the fastest ripping at about 18x on my computer.
CDex This ripped at about 5x.
EAC (exact audio copy) This ripped at about 4x.
All these programs were relatively easy to use. They all used freedb to get tags and all had a way to upload tags to freedb. CDex and EAC gave you plenty of choices on how to name the files and where to put them. Audio grabber had the same coices for name but could either put all the ripped tracks into one directory or make a seperate directory for each artist and under that each album. Since this is how I like to organize things they all were good. Audio grabber and EAC did a good job with compilation disks where the artist is different for each track. CDex solves this by putting the artist in the title. I don’t care for this my self and it is the reason I still have audio grabber around.
The surprising thing to me was that in fact these programs did not always produced the same file. Most of the songs were the same with all three programs but some were different. Tonight I will rip each CD a few times to see how consistent the ripping is.