Rippng cd's to eternal hard drive to play in using itunes

[mike8863]

I want to rip my entire cd collection to an external hard drive to play through my laptop. It's purely personal use not gigging. At home and when i'm away from home.
I did try following a thread on here and after doing about 50 cd's realised that yes I had ripped them using media player which was really quick, but they weren't recognised by itunes on my laptop:muppet: .
Is there an easy way to rip using media player and converting so they play on itunes and media player, (if required), or indeed ripping using i tunes itself.
The only stipulation is that it doesn't compromise my itunes library on my pc which i will be using to rip them.

Does any of that make sense:confused:

As you have guessed i am struggling to keep up with technology and associated terms used to describe types of files.

Thanks in advance, if anyone would rather pm with help that would be fine.

Cheers:)

[Booche]

I've hardly used itunes but cant you make a seperate folder on itunes and rip them to that folder so you know which is which, i know this seems abit straight forward but sometimes the simple way is the easiest ;)

If not stick to media player :sofa:

Cheers Dave :)

[Excalibur]

Default reply, look at Media Monkey. Does virtually everything you could wish for. Pay £15 for the bells and whistles, or free if you don't need them, which for personal, I think you don't.

[discomobiledj]

Default reply, look at Media Monkey. Does virtually everything you could wish for. Pay £15 for the bells and whistles, or free if you don't need them, which for personal, I think you don't.

+ 1 for Media Monkey

[Steve the DJ]

My personal preference is to rip a FLAC (http://flac.sourceforge.net/) copy of the CD using Exact Audio Copy (http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/), because you then have an identical lossless digital copy around a third smaller than the original. This can then be fully tagged up and will play straight away in most decent software such as Winamp (http://www.winamp.com/), Media Monkey (http://www.mediamonkey.com/) or VLC (http://www.videolan.org/vlc/).

If you would like to use iTunes to manage your music then simply convert the FLAC files to AAC (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Audio_Coding) or Apple Lossless (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Lossless) using the excellent dBpoweramp Converter (http://www.dbpoweramp.com/dmc.htm).

With hard drives so cheap I really can't see any point in ripping a CD to a compressed format, just make a lossless copy once then convert as you see fit.

Makes sense to me... :shrug:

[Megamix]

with hard drives so cheap I really can't see any point in ripping a CD to a compressed format

the two issues that moved me away from continuing with lossless in the end were - (a) Downloads were only 320 kbps - so inevitably I ended up with lesser quality and also (b) Backing up/synchronising was taking longer.

[Steve the DJ]

the two issues that moved me away from continuing with lossless in the end were - (a) Downloads were only 320 kbps - so inevitably I ended up with lesser quality...

Depends where you get them from. ;)


...and also (b) Backing up/synchronising was taking longer.

I see your point, but I would rather have the best quality I can and don't want to have to buy music again in the future, so a slightly longer back up and transfer time is a reasonable price to pay in my book.

We all know that 99% of our clients can't tell the difference between the files we play out but I like to keep my personal collection in the best quality I can for purely geeky and selfish reasons.

:headphones:

[Vectis]

Having previously ripped to WAV, I've since converted to Apple Lossless because even on my relatively high-end hifi I can't tell the difference and neither can a handful of friends and rellies we've tried the 'taste test' on.

That, and the fact that all of our personal devices understand the format, is my choice.

It's also easy enough to whack out 320K mp3s of the same for disco playout devices.

[mike8863]

how do I transfer a folder from media player to external hard drive, once i've ripped it, it won't let me drag and drop, or "send to"....??

[mike8863]

it's ok, think i've sussed it. Thanks for everyones input. thanks again.

[Larry B Entertainment]

WHy dont you import your cd's with iTunes rather than using media player ?

[mike8863]

I am now......:muppet: :bang:

[mike8863]

I am now......:muppet: :bang:

the muppet is me by the way, hence banging my head....!!!!:beer1: