When one is faced with hundreds of CDs that need to be ripped into iTunes, every bit of time-savings helps. As usual, Apple has an option for users facing this daunting task.
A quick way to import CDs with the least amount of user effort:
In iTunes’ Preferences, go to the General section. Next to “On CD Insert,” use the drop-down menu to select “Import Songs and Eject.” With this option selected, iTunes will go out to the ‘Net and get the track names for the CD, import all the tracks, and eject the CD when it’s finished importing – without the user having to touch a thing.
Yes, you still have to feed the computer CDs, but this is all the user has to do with this method.
And don’t forget to download the free “Find Album Artwork with Google” AppleScript for iTunes by Brett O’Connor which performs a Google image search using an Album/Artist name to find album artwork online. It works very well. More info and download link here.
Have fun ripping!
More information about importing CDs with Apple’s iTunes here.
This ‘tip’ is fine and dandy, but some people have their own special naming conventions. I tag all of my ripped CDs by hand, as well as scan in each insert. Slow and steady wins the race�
Yeah whatever.
Good Tip!
Slow and steady only won a single mythical race, and both animals wound up as someone’s dinner anyway.
Turtle Soup followed by a second course of Hare Pie.
A sickness. Structure for structures sake. You catalogue you matchbox collection too I bet and its dust free. I smell NERD
JR is dead on…
For about a buck a CD, these guys will do it for you.
I find too many errors in CDDB or whatever.
with over 26,000 songs imported into my iTunes, I vote with Gracenotessux. Too many errors in their database – in all categories. They don’t even have a comedy section! And the iTunes Music store has NO idea how to list artists.Accurate is essential for my collection, only a small portion imported.
I play my collection on shuffle, so it’s not that important for me to know who or what is playing.
All that I know is I won’t get the same song again for months!
rippy, your link doesn’t work. Who are “these guys”?
how did this “tip” get an entire news clip? if people actually looked through the preferences once in awhile they should already know this. and yeah you guys who hand tag every single album are wasting your time. at the very least just let iTunes import and find the track titles, then go through after and fix little mistakes (like genres, which are almost always wrong)
I just finished ripping about 3,000 CDs. I used this method, along with allowing iTunes to manage the files.
CDDB/Gracenote has lots of errors, but it’s accurate enough to use and then verify. I was surprised how many of my really rare OOP were correct in the database.
The most common error is that many CDs were incorrectly listed as Compilations. This can easily be fixed by selecting all the songs from the CD, do a Get Info (right-click or Command-I) and then deselecting Compilation. This changes all the songs and moves the files into the proper folder.
For the most part there were only a few spelling errors and so forth…definitely nowhere near the level of just saying “screw it, I’ll do it all myself”. Even if you wanted to do some special custom method, you’d be better off grabbing the CDDB data and then changing it.
By the way, this works even better if you have multiple drives. I was able to use 4 drives for ripping. This allowed me to load them all up at once and focus my attention elsewhere until they were all ejected. Ripping like this and reaching 20x speeds made this *much* faster than I thought it would be…like 3 weeks instead of 3 months.
>> rippy, your link doesn’t work. Who are “these guys”?
<br><br>Funny… the link works for me. In any case, try [url=http://www.ripdigital.com.<br>]http://www.ripdigital.com.<br>[/url]
Good Lord. So much for my HTML. The service is called RipDigital. You can likely guess their URL. And no, I don’t work there, but I do have a large CD collection that I’d like to convert, and I came across these guys somewhere.
Wow, what a rip-off! I’d be willing to do it for way less money…MP3 or AAC and whatever bitrate you wanted. I wonder if they’re getting any real business. I could whip together a Website like that in a couple of days, charge less and “make cash, right at home!”
Email me if interested:
MacslutAFRAIDOFSPAM@yahoo.com
(remove AFRAIDOFSPAM)
I could provide resume, references and other assurances if you’re interested.
[a href =”htttttp:///www.snot.com”]Type something here[/a]
replace [ with < and ] with >
or just go to HTML school, preview first then post.
G5Support.com
Crunch protiens here
Yah. It looks like she gets that part, Sailfish.
Rippy, < br > tags aren’t recognized here.
>> Wow, what a rip-off! I’d be willing to do it for way less money…MP3 or AAC and whatever bitrate you wanted.
Really? Have you thought this through, Macslut? How much will you charge to convert 10 CDs to AAC? How much time do you expect this to take you?
I’ve not only thought this through, but Like I said in an earlier post, I just finished doing 3,000 CDs. This was just using one Mac and not trying to get it done in any special amount of time. They want 6 biz days to do 1,000 CDs and it looks like they’d charge just under $1,000.
The thing is, this is mindless work…disc goes in, disc comes out, repeat. Occasionally, you have to clean a disc or fix CDDB data, but for the most part it’s something a monkey could do…or more importantly, something I could do while doing other things.
I’m not saying this is work just anyone would want to do. I’m pretty unique in that I average over 12 hours a day on my computer and I have lots of equipment (including multiple 52x drives).
How much would I charge? I’m guess no more than 75 cents per disk. I’d let the customer do their own shipping to save more. I’d let customers send in a hard drive or offer hard drive packages. They charge $350 for a 250GB USB 2.0 drive…I put together a drive for my music that was 250GB USB2 and FireWire for $180…both are Maxtor drives. Looking at their other drive prices, I’m sure I could beat those too and still make it worth my while.
They do offer DVDs of your music for free with the price of transfer. I would probably do that as well, but encourage doing the transfer on to a hard drive.
Even at 75 cents per disc, I’m still thinking it’s too much, but I wouldn’t want to price myself too much under market.
Speaking of CDDB’s errors —
Once I make corrections from the info CDDB gave me, I submit the corrected information, hopefully helping out the next person who’s got the same CD.
Whether they use it or not, I can’t know, but heck, it’s worth a shot.
Check out how to fire scripts when you load a CD by setting System Prefs, which can check for CD tracks already ripped, et al:
http://www.malcolmadams.com/itunes/itinfo/cdsysprefs.php
Hey, I hadn’t thought about that. I have a 3,000 CD collection already ripped. There’s bound to be significant overlap. I guess this is why RipDigital charges one price for MP3s at one data rate (224K) and other rates or AAC they would charge more for. I would offer a discount for AACs at 192K, though if I did this on an ongoing basis I would create a library at what the most popular data rate was.
The article’s method is ONLY GOOD WITH BROADBAND. My method for dialup:
1. Set iTunes to get track names on insert. Go through your whole CD library doing JUST that. All at once–and it goes quickly–otherwise you’ll be dialing in for every CD, or worse yet, trying to sort out CD and track names AFTER import. You don’t want to go there!
2. THEN set iTunes to import-and-eject. Go through all the CDs again.
Believe me, I’ve tried other methods. This is best for dialup users.
>> I did this on an ongoing basis I would create a library at what the most popular data rate…
I’m not sure this is legal, Macslut. You can’t build a personal library of songs by copying disks that you don’t own. I think this is a form of piracy.
This is from RipDigital’s FAQ:
RipDigital is committed to copyright protection and has actively taken steps to protect the rights of artists and music labels. RipDigital has implemented the following steps to protect copyright:
o RipDigital physically converts every single CD provided by our customers and does not keep a backup copy of any music files.
o RipDigital includes a unique identifying mark with each file to encourage responsible use of digital music.
o RipDigital requires that customers take responsibility for ownership of their CDs and agree not to upload music onto file sharing services.
Rippy, you misinterpreted what I said. I wouldn’t collect other people’s music, I would take my library of owned CDs and convert it into the format that was most popular (or perhaps multiple formats). This way when someone sent me a CD, that I already owned, I would just transfer the files from one hard drive to another, as opposed to re-encoding the whole CD. Tagging the files with a unique ID could still be done. The point being that I own over 3,000 CDs and chances are there would be considerable overlap with CDs that people sent me.