How-To Digitally Start Your Music CD Collection

If you’ve collected hundreds of music CD’s during your music collection days (or are still doing so), you might want to think about digitally organizing them. There are many reasons for doing so, which I’ll go over. Digitizing your music CD collection is not as hard as it seems and many of you most likely have already done so before. The problem is that many programs you may have used to rip the music CD’s from did only a subpar job. In this article, I’ll go over how to use a simple music CD extraction tool called Exact Audio Copy (freeware) to help you start your digital music CD library!

There are many reason why you would want to store your music CD collection in a digital format. Here are just some of them off the top of my head:

- Hard Drive Storage Price. These days, you’ll most likely notice that buying a hard drive with 500GB to one terabyte of storage space is surprisingly very cheap. Digital media geeks now have the opportunity to store just about all of their media without fear of running out of space. This also means that no matter how big your music collection is you’ll be able to store them all.

- Convenience. I know that collecting/purchasing physical music CD’s is part of the whole experience, not to mention the sound quality you get from them, but unless you take into details how to locate each and every CD you have, it can be a nightmare when you want to listen to something but can’t find the physical CD itself. By ripping your CD’s, you have only one piece of hardware to search and that is your hard drive. It doesn’t matter if you rip 20 or 500 CD’s. Your collection can be easily searched for and locating just that exact song/album you’ve been craving for since the beginning of the day is only a couple of clicks away.

- Backup. Avid music collectors will want to preserve the condition of the physical CD itself. By ripping the CD’s, you’ll be able to bypass the CD’s themselves whenever you want to listen to them because the entire album is in a digital format. If you look at it from another angle, you’ll still have a copy of the album should you either lose the physical copy or it becomes damaged enough that the music tracks starts to skip or pause.

- Portability. Would you rather physically carry a huge binder loaded with all your music CD’s or would you rather carry a small external hard drive? How about a full size CD player compared to that of a iPod or similar MP3 playback device? Even with car stereo receivers, it is not uncommon for them to come with standard USB input to allow the hookup of a external hard drive for music playback. In my car for example, I have equipped to my stereo unit a tiny 16GB USB thumb drive that holds a part of my music collection. If I were to bring the CD equivalent, I would be holding roughly about 23 CD’s in my car (most likely a lot, lot, lot more since each CD doesn’t take up 700MB when ripped with EAC)!

Exact Audio Copy

As usual, you should only use EAC to extract audio CD’s that you yourself own!

1. You can download Exact Audio Copy from here. In the download section, I recommend you click on the ‘If you encounter any problems….’ link for a quick direct download.

If you are using a antivirus that flags the download of Exact Audio Copy (EAC) with a trojan horse, don’t panic. Temporarily disable your antivirus, download the program again and during the installation stages, DO NOT install the Ebay shortcut link and everything should be fine. EAC has been enjoyed by thousands of users and is actually the tool of choice for music pirates! It has also been featured in brand name computer magazines. Here is a screen grab of what Microsoft Security Essentials alerted me to:

2. Before proceeding with anything else, we need to also download and install the LAME MP3 encoder. EAC will need this in order to rip your CDs into MP3 files. Once done so, simply extract the Lame.exe file to a directory. When we configure EAC, it will ask us for the location of this file.

3. Proceed with the EAC installation. DO NOT, I repeat, DO NOT keep hitting the Next button during the installation. The main reason is because you do not want to install the Ebay component. In the checkbox, make sure to disable that component from installing by taking off the checkmark as shown here:

4. When you start EAC for the first time, you’ll be greeted with the Configuration Wizard so let’s go over that first. EAC will present you with what it thinks is the CD drive that you will be using to extract your audio. If it has detected more than one drive, please select the one you will be using.

Next EAC will configure the drive by asking you how you want to perform your CD rips. You are allowed to pick between accurate rips (which audiophile will prefer) which will ensure that your rips are error free or speedy rips which is self-explanatory. I would recommend choosing the former option.

EAC will then attempt to look up your CD drive in a database to figure out what features it supports. If you want to perform a manual test, you’ll need a good CD and a scratched up CD for EAC to run the tests on. I just stuck with what EAC presented me with.

In the next part of the wizard, you’ll configure how EAC will actually rip your audio. For example, you’ll get to select the audio format of your choice along with the quality of it. I highly suggest you read over the Encoder Introduction part as it explains to you the different formats you can extract your audio to. For example, if you want a near perfect replica of your CD as far as sound quality goes, you’ll want to encode your audio in FLAC. However, it takes up a ridiculous amount of space per album and I mean ridiculous! As I said earlier, hard drive space is cheap but the problem here is that a lot of people can’t actually hear the differences between a FLAC rip and a high bitrate MP3 rip. In our tutorial, we’ll be using the MP3 codec since that is most familiar with everyone. Therefore, in the Encoder Selection menu, select MP3 as your option.

EAC will then tell you that you will need to provide your own MP3 encoder. If you completed step 2, then you should already have the LAME MP3 encoder already downloaded. If not, then do so right now. EAC will proceed to automatically scan your computer for the LAME encoder but to provide the location manually, simply close out the search box and browse to where you have stored the lame.exe file.

Next, you’re allowed the option to use FreeDB. This is a Internet service that allows EAC to go online and search for your album and then retrieve information about it like album title, year, artist, track listing etc. You don’t have to use this method as I’ll explain later on how you can easily tag your own information. If you do want to use this service, type in your email address. You don’t have to actually give them your real email address.

Next up is filename configuration. Here you can select how the filename for your ripped audio track will look like. You have a lot of options to choose from. Pick one that suits your taste.

The wizard at this point is finish. The last option you will make is to tell EAC to display itself in expert mode. This allows us to tweak and configure EAC to its fullest.

5. Now we will tweak some advance options before we let EAC go to work. First, head over to EAC -> Compression Options. Click on the External Compression tab. Here we will configure the bitrate setting for our ripped MP3 tracks. Because we want our audio to sound as good as possible, we will rip them with the highest setting.

In the ‘Additional command-line options’ label, it should read by default “%l-V 5%l%h-V 2%h –vbr-new %s %d” without the quotation marks. Simply change the number 2 to a number 0. This will tell EAC to use Lame’s V0 profile. It’s also important to note that EAC uses the VBR (Variable Bit Rate) to encode the audio tracks. Rather than have the entire song encoded in a certain bitrate, VBR will encode the song in various bitrate throughout the song. The result is a intelligently compressed yet very good sounding music file. You can read more about VBR here.

6. Next, we will configure some general options. So, head over to EAC -> EAC Options. Click on the General tab. If you want to access the FreeDB database for unknown CD’s, on the “On Unknown CDs” option, select the “Automatically access online freedb database” option.

If you want to use a specific directory to hold your ripped music, specify it in the Directories tab.

7. It’s now time to rip some CD’s! You’ll most likely be prompted by the AccurateRip message once you have loaded in a commercial CD. By using this feature, the EAC rip you perform can be compared to a online database to see if there are errors. In my example, I will be ripping Elvis’s 30 #1 Hits. As you can see, FreeDB picked it up immediately.

To kick off the rip process, simply click on Action -> Copy Selected Tracks -> Compressed.

Once the entire ripping process has completed, you’ll be given a status report. Here you’ll want to check if any of the tracks had any errors during the rip process.

At this point, you’re pretty much done. However, if you are a details kinda person, you’ll want to make sure the music/album is tagged correctly. For that, we use the easy to use yet powerful MP3 tagger called MP3Tag. If you want to embed album covers, you’ll want to use this tool as well. Also, if you have a rare album that the FreeDB database doesn’t have an entry for, you’ll need MP3Tag to manually enter in the information for your album once it has been ripped. I’ve written a little article on how to do so here. Once you have finished with that, the digital music album can then finally be stored in the music folder where your music player of choice (Windows Media Player, Winamp, iTunes) will monitor for. From here on, searching for your precious music is just a couple of keystrokes and clicks away.

 

In The End…

Starting your digital music CD collection with EAC has a lot of benefits especially if you have a very large collection. In my opinion, the biggest benefit is ease of search. By digitally cataloging your CD collection, you can browse and listen to any of them faster than you can find the actual CD. Yes, you’ll have a lot of work cut out for you but in the end, it’s worth it. I want to also point out that this EAC tutorial is as basic as it can get. It doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of what EAC is capable of doing. If you have high quality sound equipments, you’ll definitely want to try ripping your CD’s to a lossless format like FLAC. Chances are if you do have those high quality hardware, you already know this!
Although CD’s are becoming almost obsolete due to digital music stores like iTunes and Amazon, I don’t want readers to get the idea that is what I’m trying to convey here in this article. When it comes to movies and games, I also want a physical copy in my hands vs. just a digital copy. If you are a avid CD collector, by all means go for it and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. But I just hope you folks also see the advantages of storing that collection digitally as well.