Ripping Music (or How to Deal with All Those CDs Collecting Dust)

Most people know that you can purchase digital music from places like iTunes and Amazon, to listen to on your music player or cell phone. What many don’t realize is that you aren't limited to music purchased online--you can take the music from CDs and put that on your portable devices as well.

Ripping : extracting all or parts of digital contents from a container.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ripping)

To process of taking music from a physical device (like a CD) and changing it to a digital format (like an MP3 file) is called ripping. So that's the term you'll want to put into google if you're searching for more information.

Programs like Windows Media Player allow you to rip the music on a CD to your hard drive, and then auto populate the album and track information. Once the music is on your computer, you can copy it onto any device you want.

On most CDs, the artist, album, song titles, and other information are electronically embedded into each song, so if you look at the song properties, you can see all kinds of metadata, including song length and year published. You can even modify that information if you so choose.

One question that will come up is what codec (file format) you should use for your digital audio files. If you are an audiophile, you'll want to do some research, but if you just want to listen to music on the go, just rip to MP3 (Moving Picture Experts Group Layer-3 Audio); as long as you keep your CDs, you can always re-rip them to a higher quality format later.

If you are using Apple devices, you'll use iTunes to do the transfer. If you are using an Android device and a Windows computer, you can drag and drop the file using Windows explorer or Windows Media Player. If you have mixed technology, iTunes will probably be the easiest way to go. (NOTE: I hate iTunes and refuse to use it, but the alternatives have a learning curve.)

If you have vinyl records, the process is similar except you'll need to purchase a USB record player that you'll connect to your computer, and you'll have to enter all artist and album information manually. (By that I mean separating out tracks and entering all the metadata for each track.)

Once you've gotten your music onto your phone or music player, you can then listen to that music wherever and whenever you want--including on the road if your car stereo has a USB or Bluetooth connection.

And if you're really adventurous, you can put the music on your home network and pipe it through your stereo.

And once you've gotten all those CDs ripped, you can store them in a CD wallet (I have about a dozen Case Logic wallets for CDs, DVDs, and Blu-ray discs), which will take up far less space than all those jewel cases--and then you can donate those jewel cases using Freecycle or Craigslist, thus decluttering at well!

Ripping Music using Windows Media Player
https://www.lifewire.com/copy-music-from-cds-windows-media-player-2740880

Ripping Music on a Mac
https://www.macworld.com/article/1156861/software-graphics/howto-rip-cds.html

Audio Codecs: What They Are and Why They Matter
https://www.tomsguide.com/us/what-are-audio-codecs,review-4469.html

Things to Google:
using Freecycle
audio codecs
lossy vs lossless
metadata

 -- Michelle