Ubuntu

Music cd's onto hard-drive

Asked by Tom

I have a lot of cd's that take up a lot of space on the boat and want to put them onto my hard-drive so that i can clear some space.

I've heard that mp3 is a bad format to choose and that "wmv" is better because it's "lossless compression" is there a better format? Also i don't understand how a compression can possibly be "lossless" in the way i understand that, surely something has to be changed or it wouldn't be a compressed result. Given that a cd is only 700Mb would i really need to use any compression as even a 40Gb partition could hold quite a few cds?

So, how do i use my dvd/cd drive to copy all this music onto my laptop and what's likely to be a good format? Oh, and what would be a good package to use?

Thanks and regards from
Tom :)

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pablitofuerte
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Best pablitofuerte (pablitofuerte) said : 		#1

Hi Tom. If you want to convert your CDs to audio files on your hardrive, there are many ways to do it. Actually most of the Players have this function already implemented.
For example, Banshee (Edit - Settings - CD tab: you can choose if you want to import that music when you insert a CD, which format you would prefer mp3-flac-ogg-wav, quality of the compress audio, etc...)
Choosing the propper format might be a personal choice.
Forget about wma, MP3 is not that bad (though it is propietary) but some hardware only accepts this format (it will not support other formats as ogg) so it would be your choice. So if you got one of those gadgets check the specifications (supported formats-codecs). If this is not your situation, and you only want to play your music on your Ubuntu PC I would recommend free codecs as ogg and/or flac (lossless-no compression).
Have in mind just one thing: the more you compress, the worst the quality of the audio (if you have a good-quality compress ratio you will not even notice that lost)
If you are open-source concerned definily you would choose ogg.
If you want a CD ripper (specialized app for this tasks), have a look to Sound Juicer:
http://burtonini.com/blog/computers/sound-juicer
It has a simple and easy-to-use GUI: http://www.burtonini.com/computing/screenshots/sj-main.png

There are also a bunch of tools to convert/trancode music files already on your hardrive:
WinFF: http://winff.org/html/
OggConvert: http://oggconvert.tristanb.net/
SoundConverter: http://soundconverter.berlios.de/

Hope that helps. Regards.
Pablo

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Tom (tom6) said : 		#2

Thanks pablitofuerte :)

I'm guessing that one format for long-term storage would be fairly easy to copy and convert into a more usable format. I imagine copying music onto a device in mp3 format probably but avoiding getting 'locked in' to whatever mp3 decides to do in the future. I'm wary of all this DRM nonsense particularly.

It just occurred to me to wonder how long it takes to copy a cd, does it usually take as long or longer than normal playback?

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pablitofuerte (pablitofuerte) said : 		#3

It takes just a few minutes, and it depends on the compression-ratio and your hardware (CPU). The more compression, the more it takes.
Have a try, It is trivial ;-)).

sudo aptitude install sound-juicer

Go to Edit - Choose the options that suits you..........

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Tom (tom6) said : 		#4

Thanks pablitofuerte, that solved my question.