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Rip Music Page Options

The Rip Music page of the Options dialog box contains options that control the ripping extracting and copying of music from CDs to your hard drive. These options are largely setand-forget, though you may want to use different music quality settings for different CDs that you copy. The options are described in the following sections.

Rip Music to This Location

This group box contains a label that shows the folder in which Windows Media Player creates the compressed files containing music. The default location is your Music folder, in which Windows Media Player creates folders by artist and, within these, folders by album name. To change the location, click the Change button, use the resulting Browse for Folder dialog box to navigate to and select the location, and then click the OK button. By default, Windows Media Player names the files by track number and track name or song title, as Windows Media Player refers to it- for example, 01 My Love.WMA. To change the naming, click the File Name button and work in the resulting File Name Options dialog box . Select the check boxes for the items you want to include in the filename track number, song title, artist, album, and so on. Use the Move Up and Move Down buttons to shuffle the selected items into order. And use the Separator drop-down list to specify which separator character to use: none, a space, a dash, a dot, or an underline. Then click the OK button. Windows Media Player closes the File Name Options dialog box and applies your choices.

Rip Settings

In the Format drop-down list, select the file format you want to use for the files: Windows Media Audio, Windows Media Audio Pro, Windows Media Audio Variable Bit Rate, Windows Media Audio Lossless, MP3, or WAV. See the next sidebar for details on how Windows Media and MP3 stack up to each other.

Other Music Programs You Might Want to Use

You can get various high-quality MP3 rippers and encoders for free. Two of the leading programs are Apple Computer’s iTunes, which you can download for free from the Apple website http://www.apple.com and Musicmatch Jukebox http://www.musicmatch.com, which comes in a free Basic version and a paid Plus version. Both iTunes and Musicmatch Jukebox also play music some rippers don’t, but you may also want to get a dedicated MP3 player, such as Winamp http://www.winamp.com, rather than using Windows Media Player all the time. Select the Copy Protect Music check box if you want to use Windows Media Player’s features for personal licensing of CD tracks you copy. See the sidebar, “Digital Rights Management, Licenses, and Copy-Protection Technologies,” for a discussion of the advantage and disadvantages of using this feature. Clear this check box if you want more flexibility in what you can do with WMA files. Select the Rip CD When Inserted check box if you want Windows Media Player to automatically start ripping each CD you insert. Select the Only When in the Rip Tab option button if you want to rip CDs only when you’ve displayed the Rip tab in Windows Media Player; if not, select the Always option button. Select the Eject CD When Ripping Is Complete check box if you want Windows Media Player to open the CD tray after it finishes ripping. Both settings are good for building your music library quickly, but automatic ejection is a bad idea for a laptop computer that you use out and about as opposed to on your desk. Use the Audio Quality slider to specify the quality at which to encode the files you copy. Windows Media Player offers different bit rates graded from Smallest Size to Best Quality for the Windows Media Audio, Windows Media Audio Pro, and Windows Media Audio Variable Bit Rate formats, while the Windows Media Audio Lossless format offers only one setting. Higher bit rates take up more space but sound better. Experiment with this setting on a variety of music and find the bit rate that suits you best:

• If you want to create the best-sounding files possible, use Windows Media Lossless.

• If you want to use the files with a portable player that has limited memory, use the lowest bit rate that sounds good on the player.

Understanding the Windows Media Audio Formats

In an ideal world, you’d rip all your CDs- no, scratch that: you wouldn’t need to rip your CDs at all. But in the next-best scenario, you’d rip all your CDs to a single format that provided the ideal balance of audio quality high with file size small.

Nobody has invented that world yet, and Microsoft has chosen to muddy the waters by providing four Windows Media Audio file formats. Which should you choose- or should you use the MP3 format instead? And what about the WAV format?

Here’s what you need to know:

• WMA Lossless is considered “mathematically lossless”- technically, it doesn’t lose any of the audio data. By comparison, the other three formats of WMA and MP3 use lossy compression, so they discard some audio data. The disadvantage to WMA Lossless is that the files are very large around 25MB for a four-minute song, so they take up a lot of space on your computer and you can’t fit many of them on a portable player. Many portable players don’t play this format.

• WMA Lossless sounds great to most people, but some audiophiles claim that it doesn’t sound quite as good as CD-quality audio, which uses a comprehensive range of samples across the whole area of audio frequencies audible to the human ear. If you can tell the difference, you should probably stick with the WAV format. WAV is uncompressed, so the audio should be as perfect as the audio source. One disadvantage of WAV is that the file format doesn’t provide tags containers for information such as the artist, CD, and song. But Windows Media Player can finesse this for you, associating this information with the WAV file in its database. The other disadvantage of WAV is that the files are huge around 36MB for a four-minute song. Many portable players don’t play WAV files.

• Unless you’ve got amazing ears, very good hi-fi, or both, the advantages of compression outweigh the disadvantages. Compressed files are small enough to store in large numbers on computers, to carry in small numbers on portable players, and to transfer easily via removable media, networks, or the Internet.

• Windows Media Audio uses a standard bit rate- in other words, it saves the same amount of data for each passage of music. Windows Media Audio Variable Bit Rate uses a variable bit rate, saving more data for more complex passages of audio and less for simpler ones. A variable bit rate normally gives higher-quality audio at the same file size, or a smaller file size for similar quality. Windows Media Player may take longer to encode variable bit rate files, but if your computer is capable of running Windows Vista adequately, this shouldn’t be a concern. Some older portable players don’t support Windows Media Audio Variable Bit Rate.

• Windows Media Audio Pro is a high-compression format that produces good audio quality at small file sizes. Windows Media Audio Pro is most suitable for portable players with low storage capacity, such as flash-memory players and mobile phones. Many portable players don’t support Windows Media Audio Pro.

• MP3 and WMA use different encoding methods, but the results are roughly comparable in quality.

• MP3 is a more widely used file format than WMA, but WMA is catching up fast, especially as it has become the main audio format for online music stores such as Napster and Walmart.com. A wide variety of software MP3 players are available for every conceivable computing platform, and you can get hardware MP3 players in an impressive variety of shapes and sizes. Many software MP3 players and some hardware MP3 players can handle WMA files as well as MP3 files.

• All the Windows Media Audio formats are proprietary and support digital rights management. MP3 and WAV are not proprietary and do not support digital rights management.

Whether you choose MP3, WMA, or another format will probably boil down to what you want to do with digital audio, how high your standards are, and how much time, effort, and money you’re prepared to invest.

If all you want to do is rip your CDs, encode them, and store the results on your hard disk so that you can play them back from your computer, Windows Media Player and one of the Windows Media Audio formats provide an effective solution. Choose a format bit rate that delivers satisfactory audio quality through your sound card and speakers, load the first CD, and start ripping. In this case, you might even choose to use the Copy Protect Music feature, because it ensures that you can’t inadvertently break the law by using the files on another computer. You can transfer them to another computer, but because it doesn’t have the right license information, it won’t be able to play them.

If you want to use digital audio on a portable player, make sure that the player supports your chosen Windows Media Audio format before you buy it or if you already have the player before you rip all your CDs.