Lesson 18 - CD's & MP3 Players

I remember when CDs first started to gain major popularity. Music cassette tapes were the norm, and practically we all had walkmans, but there was something missing from cassettes; it was too cumbersome to search for a specific track. The very process of searching for a song on an album became a random game of fast forwarding and rewinding, stopping and playing; it wasn't quick and precise.

And do you remember what would happen when your cassette player ate your favorite music cassette for lunch, spewing out ribbons of tape as if it had indigestion? It was a horrible experience.

But then along came CDs! Jump to any track on a CD at random! And the sound quality was improved over their cassette predecessors.

Sure, they were a little larger than cassettes, and you couldn't really hold a CD in your pocket, but they were way ahead of cassette tapes in terms of technology and ease of use. Exit the Walkman; enter the Discman!

How CDs were cool, but when mp3s started becoming a household name, everything changed!

With mp3s you get all the advantages of CDs, but now you don't have cumbersome discs to carry around, plus you can carry around a multitude of songs on a single player! Since mp3 files are fundamentally computer files--binary files--all you need is an mp3 player, think iPod and suchlike, and you're set!

Now you can store every one of your albums on a single hand-held device, an mp3 player.

Well, you've your new mp3 player, and you've your CD collection on the shelf. What next? Now's the time to convert all your tracks on your CDs into digital music files--mp3s. Once you've done this, you can then begin transferring your mp3 collection to your mp3 player, or you can simply play your mp3s on your computer.

Mp3s are so much more convenient to handle, and, once you get started converting your CD collection into mp3s, you'll henceforth prefer the mp3 route!

The first thing you'll need is a program that can "rip" your CD's tracks into the mp3 format. Easy CD-DA Extractor is a popular CD ripping program. Its many options and settings are enough to satisfy the hardcore user, but Easy CD-DA is easy enough to use for the computer novice.

Fire up Easy CD-DA Extractor, pop in a music CD into your DVD or CD drive, and Easy CD-DA will provide the CD's track contents by artist, title and start and end time length. Inside of the CD-DA track menu, you may check any of the tracks you wish to rip, or simply check them all if you want to rip the entire CD.

At the bottom of Easy CD-DA you'll find the output folder box on the first Output tab; here you'll need to enter in a location for your ripped mp3s to reside after the process is over.

After you've selected which tracks you want to rip from you CD, press the Rip CD button and a separate dialog box will pop up, keeping you informed on the progress of the rip procedure.

The speed of the process depends on the speed of your computer's DVD/CD drive. Once the ripping process has concluded, check out the folder you selected for the output.

You'll see each mp3 file conveniently named and ready to be transferred to your mp3 player, or to be played on your computer with Windows Media Player or WinAmp.

At the bottom of the program, on the Output tab, you'll see the integrated tab on the bottom left corner. The second drop down menu should default to an option called "Near CD-Quality."

This setting should suffice for most users' purposes, but you may want to bump up what's called the bitrate for optimal sound quality. Simply put, the higher the bitrate, the better the sound quality of your mp3 files; but the higher the bitrate, the larger your mp3 file will be.

So there's a tradeoff here. Opting for the Near CD-Quality bitrate--128 to be precise--will agree with most users' ears.

All but the most finely tuned ears will be able to tell the difference between a bitrate of 128 and 192, and sometimes even 256. I like to bump up the bitrate to at least 192, as this provides a nice tradeoff between music fidelity and file size. Drop down the menu and experiment with various bitrates. In time, you'll find the perfect setting, for it also depends on the type of music you like to listen to.

Easy 3

Easy CD-DA Extractor

That's basically the gist of ripping songs from CDs into the mp3 format; easy, wasn't it? Easy CD-DA is a simple program to use, but it also features many other more advanced settings such as audio format conversion and the ability to create WMA files, as well as myriad other options. After you've ripped your first album, experiment with the many other settings, for you'll be pleased at what Easy CD-DA Extractor can do for your music collection!

To see Easy CDDA live in action, select here:

http://www.pcdocpro.com/easycdda.php

Major Jane Raymond USAFA

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A LOOK AT CDS AND MP3 PLAYERS