Hello. I have collected and kept a lot of CD's over the years. Many were kept for sentimental reasons, but there are a few which are out of print and not available anymore. I am looking for a good accessible Windows 10 app which I can use to rip songs from those CD's to my computer. Any ideas? All input welcome. Thanks.
Comments
First things first.
Do you have a cd tray? If not then you're going to have to get a cd burner.
I've not done this in years but you should be able to just open the cd and copy the file off of it, at least I think you should.
No you won't get all the metadata but if you don't care about that then this should hopefully work.
Re: Ripping CD songs to your computer.
You cannot simply copy tracks from a CD to your hard drive. You don’t need a CD burner either, just a reader. Windows Media Player will allow you to rip your songs from CD to your computer. You can configure it to automatically rip a disc when one is inserted. iTunes will also work. These are the main free options.
CD drives & software
Yes, I would need a CD drive, but I don't have 1 on my laptop. However, I did find a portable CD/DVD USB drive, with a USB cable, on Amazon yesterday for $16. So, I'm just looking for the software. I will look into Windows Media Player. I took iTunes off my computer a long time ago. Mostly because it was more complex than necessary, and seemed to grow in complexity after each release: If others aren't having trouble with iTunes, more power to you. I recall being able to rip songs from Winamp back in the day. Does anyone know if the current Winamp still can do that? Thanks again.
Foobar2000
Foobar2000 is a good free alternative for ripping CDs (it is a general-purpose media player with CD ripping built-in). It requires some setup, but the program is very accessible and there are guides on how to use it as an effective CD ripper. If you want to go more advanced you also have Exact Audio Copy. It is also a pretty accessible program, but with some quirks and it can be a bit daunting to use in the beginning.
Don't know about Winamp, but I guess it could, however, I never found Winamp to be particularly accessible.
iTunes or Apple Music does the job
Why not use iTunes/Apple Music?
In the old days, when I used Windows, I did that.
And off course ripping to ALAC (Apple Lossless).
Oh ok.
It's been years since I've done something like that, I thought you could just copy the stuff over like a hard drive.
I hope you can find what you're looking for, ripping those cds will be awesome once it's done!
CDex
Hi,
I used to use CDex years ago.
https://cdex.mu/
It was the most accessible program I've seen for ripping CDs, and it's free. But the most recent version is from 2020, so I wonder if this would work on Windows 11. It's worth giving it a try.
what blindpd said
foobar2000 is what I use for all audio things on windows. It's a Swiss Army knife. It will rip CDs by opening the CD playing it and then converting it to whatever format you want. But it's error correction abilities are limited. That's where exact audio copy comes in. That program, and CDEX, do a better job with scratched CDs. And, with a $16 CD ROM, you might need some help in that area. Windows media player will be about the same as foobar. Apple Music or iTunes, same thing. The specialized programs are better with error correction. You will need to do some fiddling with the specialized programs and with foobar, whereas the built-in apps are more basic consumer oriented. Sounds like you might be in that category
CDex and iTunes
I also remember using CDex a long time ago. The CDex site linked above does have a 2024 version. I’lll try that too since Foobar2000 is a little complex to setup, and has no help files or other instruction on how to set it up and what I should know when using the program.
Regarding my personal views on iTunes: In short, it was way more complicated the last time I used it about 11 years ago. I realize 11 years is quite a gap, and hopefully the program works much better and is more intuitive than it was in 2014. I did use iTunes for a long time back then, for 2 reasons I suppose. In 2014, iTunes was the only way to update the iPhone. I believe that was before we could use iCloud to update software. I may be wrong on that, so be gentle on your feedback, hahaha. Anuway, back then, there were a number of iTunes versions which claimed to be better than the ones before. From what I recall, JAWS was trying to keep up with the constant changes, but always seemed to be a few steps behind. And, new iTunes versions did not offer an accessible experience. After getting those updates and being disappointed and frustrated by the lack of accessibility, I gave up at a certain point. More on that below.
The interface of iTunes back then was very confusing for me. I eventually learned where a few things were, and could get basic tasks done. It generally took longer and was more frustrating though.
Finally, I had a lot of music I wanted to upload to the iTunes Match service. I’m still not sure how I completed that task, but all my music did finally end up in iCloud I suppose.
So, there are my reasons for not using iTunes. After my last use, which may have been the uploading of my music, I vowed that I would limit iTunes to anything that was absolutely necessary, such ass updating my phone. I was elated when Apple added the ability to update over the air..
Years ago,
I used to use Nero express. I used to have the full Nero suite, but I found Nero express to be a more compact user interface. Not 100% accessible, but it did the job very well and fast.