convert CD's to MP3

P

paresh

Member
Hi guys - A friend wants to convert songs on her CD's to MP3's. She's not involved in recording otherwise i don't think. What would be the simplest (& hopefully free) way to do this? It seems like she would just record from the CD player into a basic DAW & export as MP3 - is that correct? If so any suggestions on one with little to no learning curve? Audacity takes a little while to figure out from what i remember. Thanks.
 
You don't need Audacity.

There are programs such as CDex or Audiograber and similar that you can download. These will extract the tracks from the CD and sav them to your computer as WAV or MP3.
Pop a CD in, run the program, select all tracks, hit the 'convert'' button, and you're done.
 
When the CD opens in Media Player, if it's an older CD it will probably say "unknown album", and won't have the song names listed, just track numbers.

Right click on the picture of the musical note to the left and then click on "update album info", if connected to the internet media player will then almost instantly update both the album and song names.
 
What is your friend going to do with the CDs once converted?
If she is disposing of them then I strongly advise her to rip them initially as 44.1kHz `16bit (native) .wavs. She will not be able to get the original quality back otherwise. I don't know what bit rate Windows etc encodes CD to but even the best 320kbps is not .wav!

Storage is now dirt cheap, you can get an awful lot of CD as .wav on a $10 USB stick. Once copied to lossless format, friend can crush to MP3 at her leisure!

There are of course copyright issues involved in ripping a collection and then selling it.

Dave.
 
Question; When we're converting to mp3 we're advised to reduce levels a dB or so below full scale. Would anyone think that would be a consideration here?
 
mixsit said:
Question; When we're converting to mp3 we're advised to reduce levels a dB or so below full scale. Would anyone think that would be a consideration here?
Click to expand...

Since most modern music is slammed to -0.1dBFS notching it back a dB or two would seem eminently sensible to me!

Way back when we were burning .wav tracks to CD we used Nero 6 and found that if we allowed the software to "normalize" the tracks they would crack on peaks on an old Philips 360 CD machine. CD transports in computers were fine but no doubt others might have problems.

So, never hurts to "cut" a bit lower. "They" can always turn it up their end!

Dave.
 
ecc83 said:
Since most modern music is slammed to -0.1dBFS notching it back a dB or two would seem eminently sensible to me!

Way back when we were burning .wav tracks to CD we used Nero 6 and found that if we allowed the software to "normalize" the tracks they would crack on peaks on an old Philips 360 CD machine. CD transports in computers were fine but no doubt others might have problems.

So, never hurts to "cut" a bit lower. "They" can always turn it up their end!

Dave.
Click to expand...
Found this here
Do the kids prefer "mp3 sizzle" ? Bullshizzle ! - Mastering Media Blog

"If you take almost any modern release peaking near zero, check it out in AudioLeak, then mp3 encode and look again - you'll see the peak level increasing by as much as 2 dB on some releases. Some players have enough headroom on the D to A to cope with that - most don't."
So he's saying it's not just that the encoding doesn't fair well with full scale (with distortion that can be avoided) but we can get additional problems in play back.
 
I use Exact Audio Copy to rip to FLAC and then I use Foobar to make 320 kbps MP3s. If you need to reduce levels on the tracks you would do that after the track is ripped to your computer. If the tracks are part of the Loudness War then editing them might be something you want to do.
 
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