You Can't Scratch a Digital File

My dad always asks me if I know of any way to take a CD he has and rip the music files to his hard drive. “Ripping” is taking the music from the CD and changing it into an MP3 file on your computer so you can put it on an MP3 player or make your own playlist CD. I keep reminding him that I’ve shown him how to do it several times.

If you don’t want to download and use iTunes, (which, if you’re not going to use it for your music collection, just takes up valuable memory on your computer) you can use a program called CDex. Once you’ve DOWNLOADED and installed the program, open the program, click on the “options” button and click on “settings.” Once the options window is open, click on “Remote freedb” under CD Database and type your email address where it says “Your E-mail address.” While you’re here, click on “Directories & files.” Next to “Recorded Tracks,” click on the three dots and select your desktop or your Local Music folder. Click OK. (Don’t worry, they will not email you spam)

Once you place the music CD that you want to rip into your CD drive, you’ll notice that CDex calls the music tracks “Audio Track 01…02…03…etc.” To change those songs to the real names, click on the magnifying glass, as shown below:


Once you have found and selected which album you have, you can then click the icon that says “Extract CD tracks to Compressed Audio Files” as shown below:


I’ve found that, after the initial installation, this is the easiest way to convert all of your CDs to MP3 files. Even if your CD has a couple scratches, the program works with them to try to make your music skip-proof.

After your music is all “digitized,” you’ll need to back it up. We’ll talk about computer “back-ups” next.