How To Rip your music Part 1

There have been countless articles on the web about how to rip your music collection to your computer. It seems people are as passionate about this process as they are about politics or whether or not god exists. We're not saying our way is the right way, the best way, or any other way then our way, we just thought we would share our experiences with all of you.

The first decision you have to make is how are you planning on listening to your newly ripped music. Will it be played only via a MP3 player like an iPod, just over your computer speakers or will it played on your home stereo via a sweet networked music product :). Next you have to consider, how good are your ears. Do you fancy yourself a budding audiophile and believe you can hear the difference between a 192bit encoding vs a 256 bit encoding or is it all just the same noise to you?

To start with let us just assume you are not looking for lossless high quality music files and you just want the ever versatile basic mp3 format. If you are a Windows user we would highly recommend a free program called cdex.

There are many great features we like about this program. First, its free. It is hard to argue with that. Second it lets you choose the encoding engine you want to rip your music with. So in the beginning say you really don't know much about encoders or for that matter care, you just use the default. As time goes on and you get more and more into the process you have the ability to see what your music sounds like with other encoders. It defaults to using the LAME encoder and despite its name we believe this to be the best encoder to use for mp3's. It offers great compression, sound quality and speed, all very important factors when you go down the road of having to rip your entire collection. We recently ripped all 300+ of our CD's and using cdex with the LAME encoder turned what we thought would be a many month process into a week or so of dedicated ripping.

Another factor to take into consideration is the CD-ROM drive you are using. They come in all types, quality and speeds. It shouldn't really matter that much what you have, but there are people out there that are fanatics about which drive they use and swear it changes the quality of the music. Spending lots of money on a fancy Plextor drive really is only going to buy your a few minutes here and there in speed.( the benefits of those drives typically are not related to speed but rather something called jitter that we will get into in a future article ). So our recommendation is that before you go out and spend 100+ dollars on a new drive try out the one you already have. If you don't like the speed at which it rips or if it is very loud while ripping, then sure, go check out a new drive.

OK, so back to the music. A very important factor to consider is the structure that you store your music in. Again, people have all kinds of philosophies around the 'proper' way to do this. We here at networkingaudiovideo.com like the simple structure of artist->album->track number-song. You can get as fancy as you want with this, but that is how we do it so we'll just assume for this article that is how you are doing it.

The nice thing about making sure you have your library set up as cleanly as possible is the ease of browsing through it. This is one place it pays to be organized. Also it makes it easier to deal with a lot of these networked devices. They will be able to display just about any folder structure but the less complex you make the structure the easier it will be to navigate through your library with the remote or whatever the limited interface happens to be.

So the big hurdle is really the first pass at getting all of your CD's ripped. This is what keeps most people away from going down the route of a full digital music collection. We are not going to lie to you, it is not a fun process. It is time consuming and boring. We spent about a week or so constantly ripping CD's. It may have sucked then, but we can say now that we are so happy that we did it. We now have a great collection of digital music and it is very easy to keep up to date with the new CD's you purchase.

Once you have all your music digitized it really opens up so many great doors. With the amount of network music players out there and the many more that are sure to come out this year and next you have just prepared yourself to have your music anywhere anytime.
Gone are the days of finding the CD, changing it out in the player, worrying about scratches and the like.

We have to admit, the thought of going all digital had us a little worried for a number of reasons. But we must say, now that all of our CD's are in the closet and we can listen to music anywhere in our house it has all be worth it. Stayed tuned for upcoming articles on fancier methods of ripping and on backing up your music collection( you do back it up right!!!! ).

February 28, 2007

How To Rip your music Part 1