hi, wonderin if someone could help me please...i'm new to all this so please be gentle!! I'm trying to copy an audio cd onto my laptop harddrive in order to later copy onto an mp3 player.....i've come across 2 original cd's which are not recognised by windows media player or any other player as an audio player and as such I can't even play them. I've looked thro the site etc, used clony to see if there is any protection but this shows no protection. Both cd's are released by the same company (replay music) and the discs state sony licences. Don't know if that helps. If I try to copy the disc I get read errors. Also, for my other working cd's, which setting should I be using to save them...i seem to have a choice in win media player, something about variable bit rate or a slider to set at a specific rate. sorry, as i said, i'm new to all this, please help.....thanks
Just re read the above and to clarify.....the 2 cd's that won't copy/convert are brand new originals whill WILL play perfectly in the car or any normal cd player, just not pc
the CDs you are having trouble with are probably copy protected. Check out this thread for more details about how to rip them: http://forums.afterdawn.com/thread_view.cfm/70597 As for ripping CDs to your HD, I would recommend using EAC and LAME, as they make the best sounding mp3s. Steer clear of windows media. Download winamp. Its the single best mp3 player there is. And all the about software is free. Here is the guide to download and setup EAC: http://www.afterdawn.com/guides/archive/mydeneaclame.cfm
Thanks for your info, took your advice and got the EAC software and winamp, does everything well......now I have 2 further questions....It takes about half an hour to rip a 70min cd in EAC, is this the norm, time wise? and also....read in another thread that to get max number of songs on mp3 player, format should be wma????...does this mean i'll have to convert yet again?....or should I just convert straight to wma to start with and store like that on pc hard drive......which takes more space??....getting a zen micro if that helps
Thanks for your info, took your advice and got the EAC software and winamp, does everything well......now I have 2 further questions....It takes about half an hour to rip a 70min cd in EAC, is this the norm, time wise? and also....read in another thread that to get max number of songs on mp3 player, format should be wma????...does this mean i'll have to convert yet again?....or should I just convert straight to wma to start with and store like that on pc hard drive......which takes more space??....getting a zen micro if that helps
about EAC, if you have a fast CDROM drive, it only takes a few minutes to copy to the HD. When LAME then encodes them to mp3, that does take some time. Mine are usually done in about 20 minutes, but it all depends on your CDROM, memory, and CPU speed. But 30 mins sounds about normal. About the different formats, I personally don't like WMA at all, and the amount of songs you can fit on a portable player depends entirely on the compression ratio you use. Here's what I suggest: If you want to have music on your computer to listen to, and have them on your portable player, rip the CD twice. First at VBR 192kpbs, then again (saving the files in a separate folder) at maybe VBR 96kpbs. The quality won't be as great, but should be adequate enough for listening on a portable player. You should be able to fit twice as many songs on that way, and they will be decent quality. But it all depends on how much sound quality you want to lose. Its the quality/quantity ratio. Let me know if you need help with anything else. -Eric
Thanks for your reply. The reason I'm ripping the cd's to my pc is only to get them ready to transfer to the mp3 player, so I don't need to listen to them on the pc. How do I change the VBR you mentioned? In respect of the time taken, it takes about 3 mins per track on EAC and then another window opens saying it is being compressed by an external LAME program, which only takes about 35 seconds.....seems the other way round from what you experience? Thanks for your help
I'm unable to get the program to change the format to mp3. It copies each song about 30megabites in wav format, but not to mp3. After you download lame, where do you place the files after it extracts them? Should they be in the EAC folder or in their own folder?
I just followed the second link in djscoops reply above and it gives you step by step instructions about how to download eac and lame. As for music files, once they are ripped I just put them in their own folder in "my music".
I was able to get my computer to copy and burn DVD's but I can get it to make a mp3!!! Grrrrr! Seems soo simple. It tells me to compress with an external program. I went through all the steps. Will rip the cd into wav files, but not mp3????
Nevermind! I finally got it to work. Wow! Little error killed most of the day. Thanks for everyone's help.
to change bitrate, go to EAC>Compression Options>External Compression. There is a drop down menu there and you can select what bitrate you want.
