Fully digital music and MP3 players are bigger than Bob Geldof at the moment, so why not release your CDs, so that you can hear Herbie Hancock all around the house, the Kinks in your car and Jamiroquai while pumping at the gym? Transferring CDs to your computer as MP3 files means you can play those tunes on any number of audio players, and, despite the fears of technophobes, the whole process is as easy as putting on the kettle.
“I thought converting my music was going to be far more technical than it actually was,” says Debbie Thomas, from Bicester, who works as a retail co-ordinator for Oxfam and recently bought her first MP3 player. “I’d never bothered to look into it, and now that I have, I only wish I’d done so a long time ago.”
Thomas, a regular gym-goer, admits that she didn’t even know what an iPod was six months ago, yet now that she has liberated 120 favourite tracks from her CDs into a shiny new player, she wouldn’t go back. “I can cherry-pick exactly what I listen to, depending on whether I’m pounding the treadmill or walking my three dogs, and I’m no longer subjected to the rubbish they play at my gym, especially the football.”
Anybody can begin building a digital library in a few minutes, after downloading free software even to a modest computer. So, as part of the Doors Get Digital campaign, we consider the advantages — and potential pitfalls — of converting your music collection into a format you can then store electronically.
Liberating or “ripping” music from a CD is the process of transferring it to a computer’s hard drive. It takes roughly the same time as making a cup of tea and is as simple. Because ripping creates a rather large and unwieldy file, people generally squeeze — or encode — it into a compressed format, such as MP3, at the same time. Compared with compressed music, CDs do sound better, especially when played on a decent hi-fi, so nobody is suggesting that you bin them, but to create “back-ups” that are more flexible and easier to navigate makes perfect sense.
Asam Ahmad, a trainee fitness instructor from south London, ripped his first album way back in 1998 and soon made the decision to go for a fully digital lifestyle. “I had bought so many CDs over the previous 20 years that my collection was becoming unmanageable. So I started converting them all into a pure digital format, mainly for the convenience.”
There are various free programs for ripping, and several competing compression types. These include Sony’s proprietary Atrac format, AAC (used by Apple’s iTunes Music Store) and Microsoft’s Windows Media Audio (WMA), embraced by most other licensed download services. In reality, the only compressed music format that will play on every music device you own, including a growing number of in-car players, is MP3. It may be a bit long in the tooth, yet MP3 remains wildly popular and has become a de facto standard, to the fury of the music industry. Last year, Microsoft’s chief executive, Steve Ballmer, infamously referred to MP3 files as “stolen”.
However, even Sony, which resisted MP3’s charms for years, has finally bitten the bullet, and all its Walkman players — including jukeboxes and MiniDiscs — now play the files.
MP3 is less efficient than more modern formats, but it can still sound great if you don’t squeeze too hard when converting. The quality of compressed music files is broadly indicated by the bit rate, and 128kbps (kilobits per second) was the level most people preferred. Exactly how much you compress the music involves a trade-off between sound quality and file size, which used to be a bigger issue when memory was expensive and people wanted smaller files for downloading over the net. Cheaper hard drives and broadband make it less necessary to squeeze music files. For about £100, you can, for example, pick up a Maxtor OneTouch 160GB external hard drive that stores 20,000 MP3 tracks at the decent quality of 192kbps, or even 8,000 tracks in the new lossless-compression formats, which are pretty much CD quality, at half the size of the original file. The most common one is FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec); Apple’s version is called ALAC.
If you rip in MP3 at 192kbps, you will have larger files than opting for 128kbps, but they will sound dramatically better, especially if you choose a setting called VBR — variable bit rate. Within iTunes, go to Edit, Preferences, Importing, then choose the “MP3 encoder” and “Custom” options from the drop-down menus, and check the box offering VBR. Job done.
Windows Media Player 10 is a rival to iTunes and is now much better than earlier versions, but it’s still clunky and strictly for those who use Windows Media Audio. Bizarrely, the best Windows music-management program is Apple’s iTunes, which makes ripping and organising your music collection a thing of wonder, so long as you don’t let it take over or it will split all your “various” albums into folders, by artist (tip: turn off “Keep iTunes folder organised” under Preferences, Advanced). Audiophiles may prefer to use the simple, yet highly customisable, WinAmp Pro, which enables you to add the more sophisticated Lame MP3 encoder. The full version costs £10 from www.winamp.com.
Whatever option you choose, make sure that all your songs are named or “tagged” accurately when ripping CDs. As Ahmad warns: “As your collection grows, this will make it much more manageable”, and he’s right. Once you have converted a few dozen albums, you are effectively managing a database, even if it doesn’t feel like it. Poorly tagged music is like the sloppy teenager whose CDs are jumbled up, with the wrong discs in the wrong cases.
The good news is that tagging is generally done automatically by the software you use for ripping, through a free, internet-based service called CDDB. You need to be online when you pop a CD into your computer ready to rip, so your software presents you with relevant labelling information, but always double-check the CDDB wording, Ahmad says. “You’ll want to correct any details such as the date or genre: in particular, someone else’s idea of genre may be different from yours.” Accurate tagging means you will be able to find songs more easily later. For example, to a computer, there is a world of difference between “Sly and Robbie” and “Sly & Robbie”, or between “Doves” and “The Doves”. Yes, this sounds like a pain, but a little effort here will save you considerable hassle later.
