Work & Play

The CD Solution

By Thomas P. Farley

When was the last time you bought a compact disc? For many of us, that’s like asking your friend about his latest video cassette purchase. But what about all those shiny discs you bought before the advent of iTunes, peer-to-peer sharing, music streaming and cloud storage made it so easy to find music online and access it on the device of your choice? In other words, is Fatboy Slim still staring at you from a jam-packed CD tower, its CD case growing dustier with each passing year?

Antiquated though they may seem, CDs should not be consigned to the digital rubbish heap — at least not until you’ve got what you need from them. For starters, the music quality is far superior to that in an MP3. The MP3 is a small file for a reason — it doesn’t contain anywhere near the amount of data (and thus fidelity) that a track on a CD does. Secondly, although the selections offered on Amazon, iTunes or India's own Saavn are enough to keep your head banging for a lifetime, chances are you own some eclectic albums that you won’t find in any of those libraries.

So what’s a guy to do about all those CDs that haven’t seen the light of day since Friends was a staple of Star World evenings? You’ve got two options: Do-It-Yourself (DIY) and outsourcing.

The DIY Route

If you're on a PC and don't use iTunes, there is software both free (e.g., Winamp) and paid (e.g., Nero and Winamp Pro) that can assist you with the music importing process. These time-saving programs will also help you manage your music library once you've finished importing your CDs. On a PC (and again, providing storage space is not an issue), you'll want to import the songs in either .WAV or FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec). 

If you’re on a Mac and use iTunes to manage your music, you'll find an option under preferences (within the iTunes pull-down menu) to import songs automatically on insertion of a CD. Select that option. Also in this menu you'll find your import settings. To import your music at the highest quality possible (provided that space isn't an issue) select AIFF Encoder or Apple Lossless Encoder. If storage space is an issue, you can import your music as MP3s. As noted above, though, the MP3 format makes use of crafty (though some say undetectable) audio compromises to keep the files small. 

The good news is that regardless of whether you're on a Mac or a PC, the software will do most of the heavy lifting for you (including finding album artwork and ID-ing the tracks on your CDs automatically). But you’ll still be stuck with the mind-numbing task of popping the CDs in and out of the computer every several minutes — with the time for ripping dependent on the format you select.

Once you’ve imported a few discs, test the extracted music by streaming it to your various devices (desktop, laptop, tablet, phone). Make sure the format you’ve selected will not prove problematic—or acoustically unsatisfying—on any of them. (Not all cloud services will accept the higher resolution files, for example.) Once you’re pleased with the results, finish ripping the rest of your CDs. And when you’ve finally finished, back up! Save your music files on a large external drive (or two) and, for safekeeping, on a cloud-storage server as well.

Outsourcing

Find a service that will convert all of your CDs to digital files and put them onto a hard drive or music player for you. Usually, any reasonable local market in India nowadays offers Internet cafes, printing services and CD conversions. Expect to pay anywhere from Rs. 25 to Rs.75or more per disc, depending on the final format you select. Highly reputable data-archiving companies will be pricier, and could clean your discs prior to importing and even attempt to repair damaged ones.

To make sure you’ll see your precious music collection again, ask your friends for services they might have used, or ask around at well-known music shops.

Once you’ve got your music back, if you’re an iTunes user, you can pay Apple $25 (about Rs. 1250) for a new service called iMatch, to which you can upload all of your ripped CD content. Once your files are in the cloud, that music, along with any music you’ve purchased from the iTunes music store, will automatically be placed in your music “locker,” accessible to you on all of your iOs devices via the web.

Google’s Music Beta (free for up to 20,000 songs) and Amazon’s Music Cloud (MP3 and AAC only) offer cloud hosting of your music files, too. But be prepared for a long initial upload that can take hours, if not days. This won’t tie up your computer entirely, but it will slow down your Internet connection.

Regardless of whether you go for the DIY route or the outsourced one, you will love having all of your music at your fingertips all the time. Now your biggest dilemma won’t be where to keep your music, but what to do with the space where that CD tower used to be.

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