One of the common questions that friends and colleagues ask me is how to take a regular audio CD and convert the tracks to MP3 files. The days of wearing a CD player are long gone thanks to smartphones! However, why pay 99 cents on iTunes or the Google Play store for music you may already have !? Instead, you should dig out all those old CDs and copy them to your computer, which can then be imported into your iTunes music library and synced to your phone.
The process is actually quite simple and only requires Windows Media Player, which is installed by default with Windows. In Windows 7 and Windows 8, you can rip audio CDs directly to MP3 format, without having to convert them from one format to another.
To start ripping music from an Audio CD, insert it into your CD / DVD drive. If Windows Media Player hasn’t been opened yet, when you insert the CD, a small window titled Now Playing will appear, and when you hover over the album art, you will see a small button to rip the CD.
If you already had WMP open, you will go into library mode and you will see several new menu items at the top: “Rip CD” and “RIP Settings”.
Library mode is better in the sense that you can select the exact tracks you want to rip instead of ripping the entire CD. To do this, simply uncheck any track you do not want to rip before clicking the Rip CD button.
Note. Make sure you are connected to the Internet before ripping the CD as WMP will look for album and track information and add that metadata to the file.
Also, before copying, you should check the copy settings to make sure they meet your requirements in terms of format, quality, etc.
You can choose Windows Media Audio, Windows Media Audio Pro, MP3 and WAV as the output file format. The default audio quality is 128kbps, but you can copy it up to 192kbps if you want.
If you are ripping many CDs and do not want to change these settings for each CD, click Advanced Options and then change the defaults. Here you can also see the default music copy location, which is probably the Music folder in the Users folder.
When you click Rip CD, the process will begin and the amount of time to rip the CD depends on the speed of your CD / DVD drive and the speed of your processor, but overall it should be a fairly quick process.
That’s all! Ripping CDs is really easy nowadays, and if you have a lot of old music CDs, copy them all before you lose them. If the CD has copyright protection, the ripping process might fail, but so far Windows Media Player was able to rip just about every CD I threw to it. If you have questions about copying
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