How do you convert music from CD to MP3?

O.P.H

I just downloaded audacity but to use it I need to convert my music thats on CD to MP3. I use Musicmatch Juke Box and iTunes and just want to know if anyone knows a simple way of converting, cheers.

LundiMardi

http://www.cnet.com.au/mp3players/musicsoftware/0,239029154,240057141,00.htm

Kenny_D

Any music player rips mp3's. Windows media player can do it though its default format is wma. Just change it to mp3 in the settings. Musicmatch is grand as well unless you have the trial version which rips at a very slow speed. Things like MM and WMP are better because they name the mp3's as you rip them if you're connected to the net at the time. Winamp is another popular one

Cabaal

iTunes is pretty good, and it'll add album art as well.
Just remember to change the default output setting from apple's format to MP3 in the preferences and you'll be sorted.

Snowbat

Audacity also works with WAV. If you plan on editing tracks you should rip to WAV (rather than a lossy compressed format like MP3) to preserve the sound quality.

SeanW

I would reccommend CDex. It's open source, free and easy to use.

http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=CDex&fr=yfp-t-501&toggle=1&cop=mss&ei=UTF-8

You can use this to rip CD tracks to either Mp3 or Wave. My preference is to rip tracks to Wave, then convert them from PCM to ADPCM - that's loseless/minimal loss compression with files that are reasonably small.

WMP only rips to Windows Meta Audio.

Lump

As SeanW has already said, CDEx is good.

John

mkennedy

another vote for cdex here.

juliuspret

Ive used dbpoweramp with good results.

AdrianR

WMP only rips to Windows Meta Audio.

Correct up to version 9, although you could get a $10 plugin to rip MP3. Version 10 rips MP3 without any plugin - apparantly.

zilog_jones

I use EAC. It's pretty complicated to set up, but it can be very accurate at extracting CD audio (a process which isn't as error-free as you'd think), and you can use pretty much any encoder that has a commandline interface with it.

There's a guide for setting it up here.

From what I've seen in many tests, LAME can be significantly better at MP3 encoding than what MS and Apple offer (here's one example, though a bit old). EAC and CDex can use LAME.

iTunes is pretty good, and it'll add album art as well.

No it won't, it'll only add album covers to iTunes or your iPod - it doesn't actually put the pictures in the MP3s or in a place usable by anything else. They are pretty decent quality scans though... when it gets them right

supergrip

cdex for me too.

byte

Yup, another vote for CDex.

steveland?

AdrianR wrote:

Correct up to version 9, although you could get a $10 plugin to rip MP3. Version 10 rips MP3 without any plugin - apparantly.

Yup, WMP10 rips to MP3 no bother