How To: Rip Your Music Like a Pro

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For most people, dropping a CD into their disc drive and clicking “Import” in iTunes is good enough. For music freaks, though, it’s not—and with good reason. Here’s how to digitize your tunes, the right way.

First off, some reasons to take this road: iTunes is a decent audio encoder, and it’ll get your music from point A—the CD—to points B, C and D—your computer, your MP3 player and your backup drive—without much trouble. But it’ll do it with a less-than-great encoder, with occasionally inconsistent tagging, with album art that’ll only work on Apple devices, and without support for the best lossless audio formats and MP3 encoding options, which you probably want, whether you know it or not.

In short, the ripping process deserves a little more care than iTunes or Windows Media player can give it. You can pay people for this, which feels dumb and wasteful, or you can do it yourself. It’s not difficult, at all. Here’s what you do:

Get Your Software

The first step to ditching iTunes is to, well, ditch iTunes. What we’re looking for is ripping software that offers more encoding options than iTunes, but more importantly, a better encoder. And as far as MP3 encoders go, the open source LAME is as good as they get. There’s plenty of software for both Mac and PC that leverages this encoder, but here are two programs that do lots, lots more.

Mac OS X: Max

From the makers:

When extracting audio from compact discs, Max offers the maximum in flexibility to ensure the true sound of your CD is faithfully extracted. For pristine discs, Max offers a high-speed ripper with no error correction. For damaged discs, Max can either use its built-in comparison ripper (for drives that cache audio) or the error-correcting power of cdparanoia.

What this translates to: Great error reduction, fantastic sound quality, and tons and tons of encoding options—not that you really need those to do a good rip, but hey, they can’t hurt. On…

V/r

Ray

Sony’s S Series Walkman: The S is for Style

Sony’s new S Series Walkman Video MP3 players have just hit stores and they’re looking mighty fine. Available in 8 and 16GB, the S Series is a stylish, affordable option for the overcrowded MP3 player market. At W 1 3/4 x H 3 5/8 x D 5/16 inches and weighing in at a mere 1.6 oz, the S series is the thinnest Walkman to date, but let its slight frame fool you, this Walkman has a few tricks up its sleeve.

Want to live out those latent DJ fantasies? Now you can thanks to the high quality, built-in “Digital Linear Phase Speaker System” that lets you share your great taste in music with others. In addition to the speakers, Sony has also added their patented “Clear Audio” technology to ensure listeners get quality playback every time.

The MP3 player also comes equipped with an FM tuner with the added bonus of an FM recording feature that allows users to record songs from the radio, just like we used to do in the good old days with tape decks and cassettes. There’s also a voice recording feature so you can record memos and reminders. The S Series is compatible with iTunes 8.1 so songs can be transferred using the Content Transfer feature or use can just drag and drop what they need onto the device.

via popgadget.net

Creative unveils Android-based iPod touch rival

By Jose Vilches, TechSpot.com
Published: July 28, 2009, 7:08 PM EST

A filing with the FCC last month offered some evidence that Creative had a new touch screen portable media player in the works. Named after the system-on-a-chip processor the company showed off during CES 2009, the Zii Egg has been officially unearthed today and its feature set actually shows promise. Click on link for more details.

 

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