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General discussion

Moving CD Music to MP3 players

Feb 8, 2009 10:35PM PST

I confess. I am clueless about the best way to move music from a CD to an MP3 player.

Current player is an iPOD classic (actually, it's my daughter's). We are running Win XP. (FWIW, I know NOTHING about windows media players.)

We had a Samsa but I couldn't figure out how to load music onto it before it broke, oops.

Please forgive me for asking a "dumb question", but I just can't keep up with every piece of tech out there any more, esp stuff that comes with a manual written in microfont *sheepish grin*. Any more, I'm happy to be able to make calls with a cell phone. Getting old is a... an offense to the AUP. lolxor

Thanks in advance for your patience with me. Kat

Discussion is locked

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You're Probably Doomed......
Feb 9, 2009 3:06AM PST

....to use Apple's vile iTunes software (download it from the Apple website). Alternatively there are third party alternatives which, hopefully, some kind soul here will tell you about. Windows Media Player isn't one of them.

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clueless
Feb 9, 2009 7:04AM PST

I am also clueless. I keep reading the posting to learn more. Don't think I will ever get there.

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To confuse you further:
Feb 9, 2009 7:35AM PST

Ignoring the iPod, lets take a typical MP3 player and say you want to add some songs to it from a CD album you own.

You can do this by inserting the CD album in your computer's CD/DVD drive and getting Windows Media Player to 'rip' tracks from the album to produce MP3 or WMA files that will play on MP3 players.

Note where WMP intends to store the resulting files.

Once this is done you need to locate the files which have been produced and link your MP3 player to the computer via a USB connector.

The computer should recognise the player as an extra disk drive and you simply drag and drop the music files from the folder the music files are in into the new drive representing the MP3 player.


There are various refinements to this process -- such as transferring the whole folder to the player so that the songs from the album are visible in the player as a group (ie as per the album they came from).

Some players don't support sorting files by folder and so you have to "tag" the music files so that they appear together in the correct order. There are free tools with which to tag files.

Some players have their own software (or use WMP) to automate the transfer and labelling of files.

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Thanks!
Feb 11, 2009 12:38PM PST

Thanks for the advice, that really doesn't sound that difficult.

Believe it or not, I've never used Windows MP (**checks watch, wow, it's 2009, who knew?**). I checked it out and it doesn't look too difficult to use but it apparently won't work with our iPod? *sigh* Of course.

I haven't investigated iTunes yet, I'll have to download that and give it a try. Hopefully, it will be intuitive.

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if you're going to use iTunes, one piece of advice
Feb 11, 2009 1:37PM PST

You need to change your import settings to mp3. That way, when you copy your cds onto your computer using iTunes they will be mp3s. iTunes default setting is aac, which only a few players support.


Open iTunes, go to the edit menu. The first tab should be "general" tab. In the middle there will be a button that says "import settings." Click on that. A box will open up. The top line will say "import using" and there will be a button next of that that will say "aac encoder." Click on that and then change it to "mp3 encoder." Then choose whatever setting you want below that. Keep in mind that the better the audio quality, the larger the resulting file size will be. You may want to experiment with different settings to get the audio quality that works for you.

Then press "ok" twice. You should be ready to go.

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Avoiding itunes...
Feb 11, 2009 8:48PM PST

I always end up shouting at itunes -- even friends who are Mac owners are confused by it.

I gather there are third party programs for the iPod -- Floola is one mentioned in posts here as I recall. Surely can't be worse, so must be worth a look for it (and others).

However, in typical Apple style, the latest iPod range have some fix that bars one from using anything but itunes.

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thanks for the advice
Feb 18, 2009 5:40AM PST

I have had a chance to play around with the suggestions made here and yay, they work!

I copied off about 50 albums ... oops, "cds"...to the ipod in the last few days. Aside from the fact that itunes is so cotton pickin' slow, it all worked great. The biggest point of confusion for me was thinking I could drag the tunes from the import list onto the player.

So thanks all, and I hope I can help a few others in turn.

You guys rock.