5.3 Ripping CDs into MusicMatch

If you don't have any music files to move onto that brand-new iPod, it's easy to whip some up with MusicMatch. Just grab those albums and start up the program. Then proceed as follows .

5.3.1 Phase 1: Choose an Audio File Format

When you slide a CD into your drive, Windows XP, if that's what you're running, asks you how it might assist you with the disc you've just inserted. In the dialog box that appears, choose MusicMatch Jukebox Plus to play the CD. (Earlier versions of Windows are not quite as forthcoming as Windows XP. If you've used MusicMatch Jukebox to play CDs before, the program should open right up. But if Windows presents you with a list of programs to consider for the task, choose MusicMatch Jukebox Plus.)

MusicMatch Jukebox Plus starts out set to produce MP3 files recorded at 128 kilobits per second (see Chapter 3), but you can adjust this rate (to produce smaller music files, for example). To do so, press Shift+Ctrl+S or choose Options Settings, and then click the Recorder tab. Use the Recording Quality controls, as shown in Figure 5-4.

Figure 5-4. The Recorder Settings window lets you adjust the bit rates of your MP3 files. You can choose a preset one ”"CD Quality (128 kpbs)," for example ”or use the slider to raise or lower the bit rate. The Settings box is also where you can choose to encode songs in other audio formats like WAV. Although MusicMatch Jukebox can play and rip files into different digital audio formats, not all of them are compatible with the iPod. The MP3 and WAV formats are the iPod-friendly ones.

5.3.2 Phase 2: Download Song Names and Track Information

It turns out that most audio CDs don't include any digital information about themselves . When you first insert a music CD into a PC, you may be disappointed to discover that to the computer, every song on it is called "Track 1," "Track 2," and so on ”and the name of the album is "Audio CD." If you don't do anything to solve the problem, after you've ripped, say, seven CDs into MusicMatch Jukebox, you'll find that you have seven songs called Track 1, seven songs called Track 2, and so on ”not the easiest way to organize your music.

If you have a high-speed Internet connection (like a cable modem or DSL), the program quickly dashes out and brings back the information by itself (unless you've changed the Deferred CD Lookup setting described next ). Behind the scenes, the program is consulting the Internet's massive, comprehensive CD Database (CDDB), which is maintained by a company called Gracenote (http://www.gracenote.com). After MusicMatch sends information from the disc to the CDDB Web site, the database identifies the album and sends back the song titles and other data for MusicMatch to display.

If you have a dial-up modem, you may prefer the Deferred CD Lookup option, which appears on the CD Lookup/Connectivity tab of the Options Settings box. With Deferred CD Lookup, MusicMatch Jukebox waits to download the information for your songs until the next time youre online.

If your CD has no entry in the CDDB database ”if, for example, it's the demo disc for your brother's punk-klezmer quintet ”you can also manually enter the track information by clicking in each line and typing the song, artist, and album names. Or you can edit the track's tag files , as described in the box on below.

UP TO SPEED
ID3 Tags: The Basics

When you use an option like the CDDB database, MusicMatch (or iTunes, for that matter) matches a code on the CD with the corresponding track information in the online database. That information, which includes artist, song, and album name, is then stored in a part of the MP3 file known as the ID3 tag.

Most MP3 and audio-management programs rely on these tags, which have been around since the mid-1990s, to sort and organize song files. Editing ID3 with an MP3 program like MusicMatch is a handy way to fix an occasional typo or incorrect information from an online database (see Figure 5-7).

Figure 5-7. In the Edit Track Tag(s) box, you can add art, adjust the text in the track's tag, paste in lyrics, add notes, and even see where the song file lives on your hard drive. To get started, right-click any song title in your library and select Edit Track Tag(s) from the shortcut menu.

Although the original tag standard allowed for a limited amount of information to be entered, a newer version of the ID3 tag standard, ID3v2, has room for things like the song's lyrics, elaborate commentary , and pictures. Both MusicMatch and iTunes include an option (in the tag-editing box) to convert a track's ID3 tag to the newer version of the standard. There's detailed technical information on ID3 tags and how to use them at http://www.id3.org.

NOTE

If MusicMatch tries to download song information and seems to be running into a wall, it might be doing just that ”smacking up against your network's firewall. In that case, check the program's settings to make sure you have any proxy addresses or other necessary information filled in. Check with your network's system administrator if you're not sure what the settings should be.

If MusicMatch Jukebox Plus keeps causing your personal firewall software to complain, consult the program's help files to learn how to let MusicMatch Jukebox pass through without alerting you.

5.3.3 Phase 3: Convert the Song to a Digital Audio File

Once your song information is in place, click the red Record button identified in Figure 5-1. When the Recorder window pops up, showing the list of songs on the CD, pick the tracks that you want to convert to MP3 files (Figure 5-5).

Figure 5-5. The Recorder lets you select as many songs as you wish from any CD. The second column keeps you updated on MusicMatch's progress as it rips the selected tracks.

When the Recorder first opens, all songs are checkmarked. Turn off the checkbox next to any songs you'd prefer not to rip. If you only want one or two songs off the album, clicking None above the song list in the Recorder window unchecks all the songs at once, saving you a few seconds of clicking. This is a great technique when you want only one or two songs in the list; turn all checkboxes off, then turn those two back on again. (Click All to turn them all back on at once.) The Refresh button forces the Recorder to rescan the CD drive for the disc inside (the program sometimes doesn't notice that you've swapped in a different disc).

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTION
Analog or Digital Recording?

I very much enjoyed Figure 5-4. I was puzzled, though, by the choice between analog and digital recording. I thought MP3 files are digital, and so are the iPod and my PC. What's the deal?

The Analog recording mode is slower because it records songs in real time, but it can produce MP3 files with better sound quality, especially if your computer's CD drive isn't equipped to handle digital extraction or doesn't do it very well. If you have an older CD-ROM drive and your MP3 files don't sound very good after digital recording, try switching to Analog mode by choosing Options Settings, clicking the Recorder tab, and turning on the Analog box.

Most modern CD drives handle digital recording quite well and can really speed up the recording process, even up to twelve times the normal play speed of the song. A digital recording usually sounds better than an analog recording, but a high-speed processor and good sound card can make analog recordings very close in audio quality to their digital cousins.

Once you've selected your songs for ripping, click the Record button at the lower left (visible in Figure 5-5). MusicMatch gets to work converting the tunes to MP3 files on your hard drive, keeping you informed of its progress by posting percentages of conversions completed next to each song title.

NOTE

To focus the computer's processing power on the track-ripping task at hand, MusicMatch doesn't play the songs as they're being converted into MP3 files. If you do want to hear the music as it's being converted, though, choose Options Settings, click the Recorder tab, and turn off "Mute while recording."

The time it takes to convert a CD to MP3 format depends on the speed of the computer and its CD drive, the bit rate you've chosen , and whether or not you've turned on MusicMatch Jukebox Plus's automatic error-correction feature (in the Settings box shown in Figure 5-4). On average, a file converted at 128 kbps takes about 20 seconds per minute of audio.

The Recorder window (Figure 5-5) displays the recording speed as you rip along, so if you see a number like 5.0x in the window, you know you're recording that song at five times its normal play speed. The program may adjust its speed as it encounters and corrects errors.

NOTE

Open, memory-hogging programs like photo-editing software or games can slow down the ripping process; so can frequently saving files in other programs.

When the program is done converting your songs, it politely hands back your disc by ejecting it from the computer's drive.

5.3.4 Phase 4: Add Cover Artwork

As shown in Figure 5-6, an accompanying image of an album cover or other evocative art adds a professional element to your MusicMatch experience. Thousands of prescanned album covers can be found around the Web on music ecommerce sites (like Amazon), which you can download to your desktop with just a right-click of the mouse.

Figure 5-6. A dash of art in the track's tag can perk up the window quite a bit. If you don't want the album cover, you can have any picture you want in the player's art window.

Here are a few other artwork tips:

• If you have a scanner and a love of art, you can also scan images from the CD insert ”or anything else ”and attach the image to the track. Save the artwork as a BMP or JPG file in the MusicMatch Jukebox Plus folder on your hard drive.

  Then right-click a track in the MusicMatch list and, from the shortcut menu, choose Edit Track Tag(s). In the Edit Track Tag(s) box that appears (Figure 5-7), click the Find Art File, navigate to the correct image, click it, and click OK. The artwork appears in the media window whenever the song plays.

  GEM IN THE ROUGH
  Autoimporting

  MusicMatch Jukebox can watch for the arrival of newly downloaded music files and automatically import them. All you have to do is tell the program which folders to keep an eye on ”the ones you put new music in.

  
  
  

  To set this up, choose File Watch Folders. Turn on Enable Watch Folders and click Add. Browse to the folder or folders where you save your newly downloaded music and click OK, as shown here. (You can add as many as you like.)

  From now on, whenever it's running, MusicMatch Jukebox automatically adds the new tracks to the library ”and gives you one less chore.

  
  

• To copy the same piece of art to all the tracks on an album, select a song from it and then open the Edit Track Tag(s) dialog box (see Figure 5-7). When the song is listed in the Track Filename(s) window, click Load Album below it to round up all the tracks ripped from that same album. Click Select All.

  On the other side of the Edit Track Tag(s) box, turn on the checkbox where it says Art. Click Find Art File, navigate to the picture you want to use, and click Open. The art gets pasted into the tag for each track on the album. Click OK.

• Pressed for time but still want your tracks to be artful? MusicMatch Jukebox can hunt down the album's art for you automatically. In the Settings box (Ctrl+Shift+S), click the Display tab and turn on "Look up album art if not already present."

NOTE

You can also even make MusicMatch change your PC's desktop wallpaper to match the album art for whatever album is playing. Just turn on "Use album art as wallpaper."