Just Don’t Bite

I’ve been asked several times in the last week how to do something that really should be common for people to do. Simply shift the music from a CD to your computer, for free, with no added trouble or mess. Of course we’re going to use some thing free. We’re going to use CDex a nice little app that I’ve used for years. Now back then… hrmm been a good while. You had to add the mp3 encoder too. You’d have to get a copy of LAME and that would be your encoder. LAME is also free, it has been since 2000 when it was compiled cleanly. Kinda nice really.

At that time there was a community driven project known as CDDB. It has sense been bought out and is now Gracenote, but does the same thing. Works great, you hit a button and the whole CD is named and ready to go. Now enough with the history lesson and time to explain how to do it and for that you click to read more.

First of all if you haven’t clicked the links above and found the download links. If not, then I suggest you scroll back up a little bit and click those links and find the downloads. If you cannot handle this, well I’m sorry there is zero help for you. You must learn to catch fish.

Ok, now that the trauma of that is over and it’s several hours later. I’m hoping you’ve found the link to download CDex and have installed it. Now you see that you a new icon. Find the one that looks like this little image.

Yes, you now need to run the program. Simple little app really. But before we can use it we need to set up a few options. Hit the F4 key, saves me another screen grab, this opens up your settings. By default the encoder options be the tab you see. See that part that says “Bitrate Min” set that to at least 192kbps. Unless you’re and audiophile you aren’t going to notice higher, and if you are one of them… you already know how to do this.

The next tab you want to click on is “Remote CDDB” put your email where it asks you. Simple huh? Hit ok and you’re good. Toss in one of your music CDs and pull the info from CDDB, the icon with a magnifying glass and a cd on it, second from the bottom. If the CD exists everything will be named and you can hit “Extract CD Track(s) to compressed file(s)” thats the second icon from the top. Now wait….

When it’s done, they’ll be in “My Documents” under MP3. Don’t worry, Windows Media player will look there. The sick thing is the vast majority of people will just use iTunes to rip their CDs and play the mp3s. But hey, at least I tried to give you a more powerful and flexible way to shift your CDs in a format that is universally played. Of course if OGG was supported by more playback devices it’d be nicer to use.

For as much as a pain that was… maybe I won’t explain shifting DVDs.