Help

[flyinggoose55]

Need some help. I'm new at this site and it seems pretty cool. but any way I have over 2500 CD's that I purchased over the years and I bought a new external hard drive to load the CD's on. I'm am currently using the windows media program to listen and burn cd"s. When down load the CD's on the hard drive the will not play does any body have a good Idea on how to do this?

[Sparky9]

http://cdexos.sf.net/

[RACKnRAIL]

You need to rip them. WMP can do it.

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/knowledgecenter/mediaadvice/0080.mspx

[Boomer The Dog]

I've used CDex also, but not for a few years, since I'm still using Audiograbber. When I first found Audiograbber a while ago, it seemed like the greatest CD copier I'd ever seen!

http://www.audiograbber.com-us.net/

Lame mp3 dll plug-in, so that you can save to mp3:

http://www.free-codecs.com/Lame_Encoder_download.htm

This is a Zip file, open it and copy the file inside lame_enc.dll to Audiograbber's folder, see the audiograbber site for details of how to do it.

Of course if you don't want to compress your music at all, and just want to archive as wav files, Audiograbber can be set to do that too. You can also use Flac, which is lossless compression.

There are reasons to use wav over any compressed format for serious archiving, even though it takes the most space. For one thing, I think it's most likely to last as a format, so even in 50 years you should be able to recover your music to whatever systems are in use by then, and copy it from one media to another in the mean time without losing anything.

You have a big project there, and it will pay to think about the best approach to take. The thing is, I don't think you'll ever be sorry if you are able to use wav files.

[CiS]

I would suggest ripping the CD's with EAC and encoding with Lame (both free). This is pretty much the standard. Here is a pretty decent guide to get you going:

http://jiggafellz.isa-geek.net/eac/