Mountainous stacks of CDs and traditional stereos and boom boxes are quickly giving way to digital music libraries stored on the hard drives of PCs. If you find yourself on the outside looking into the digital music world – then read on!

Compressing your CD's Into Digital Music Files

Okay. Let’s say you have a CD of Kansas’ Greatest Hits. There are a number of songs on that CD which include an even greater number of different sounds: from pipe organs, to vocals, to percussion, to electric guitars. All that sound – for lack of a better word – is stored on that CD. Now, think for a moment… That’s a lot of musid! How do you get all that sound onto your PC’s hard drive, while at the same time not taking up too much of that precious storage space?

Enter: audio compression. For more information on this, I'll refer you to an article I recently wrote entitled The Novice’s Guide to Audio Formats and File Extensions. This article goes into detail concerning the various popular audio file extensions available, such as WMA, MP3, RA, and WAV.

Nonetheless, I will simply compress (no pun intended) the high points of that article to get you started.

As I have already mentioned, there's a lot of sound data stored onto a CD. Actually, there's so many sounds on that CD that the human ear cannot hear or discern all of them – actually, most of them. This is the heart and soul of how CD albums can be compressed quite substantially. Think about compressing the data on the CD to about 1/10th of the original CD size.

How does this work? Simpler then you may think! The compression algorithm (the fancy-shmancy scientific name tech geeks give it to make all us normal people feel unworthy) file leaves out a number of sounds which are indiscernible to the human ear (sorry dogs – you have to lose out on the sound quality.)

For example, there are a number of sounds which – despite being stored on CD – are not within the human’s range of hearing. So the compression algorithm cuts it out – and the audio file still sounds practically the same to the human ear. There are some other sounds which the compression formula cuts out – such as the quieter of various simultaneous sounds (after all, you’re not going to hear it anyway). Deleting these sounds from the audio file, the compression algorithm is lowering the file size by quite a substantial amount, while keeping most of the audio quality the same.

Now you know how audio file compression works, but how do you make it happen? How do you magically transform your music files on CD into a compressed file extension?

Let’s assume you’re new to all of this encoding and digital music stuff. To start, you are going to need an audio CD "ripper" program. There are many of these programs out there that are totally dedicated to "ripping" CDs (that simply means converting the CD music file to a compressed format such as WMA or MP3. iTunes calls it “importing.") My philosophy – however – is wherever and whenever possible, to kill two birds with one stone. In this case, that means using a program which both encodes your CDs and organizes your music at the same time.

There are more than a few programs out there which are able to – at least on an elementary level – do both CD ripping and digital music organization (among other bells and whistles.) Here are some of the most popular:

• Windows Media Player (WMP)
• iTunes
• WinAmp
• Yahoo Music

Some players not only allow you to rip music from CDs, but also to purchase music from online stores. iTunes is one example of this type of program.

The bottom line is that you are going to need a CD ripping software program which is also able to help you easily organize your music, if you are planning to enter the digital music party. Let’s get back to our example of the Kansas CD. To rip that CD to your computer’s hard drive, you are going to need to go to the “rip” or “encode” mode of the program you are using. Personally, I have chosen Windows Media Player. You can use whatever program you want – it just needs to be able to rip CDs. Most programs will coach you through the process. Many times, if you simply place the CD within your CD drive, the music program will open and ask if you want to rip the CD contents onto your hard drive using a certain CD encoding program.

The encoding (compressing) process of your Kansas CD will take a little while to complete, depending on the speed of your computer, and the type of compression you have chosen. CD compression isn’t like the poof of a magic wand. The compression speed depends on a number of factors – including the quickness of your PC, how beat up or in good shape your CD is, the file sizes stored on the CD, and what CD compression program you are using. The average compression process takes around five minutes.

Organizing Your Digital Music

Now that you have your Kansas music files on your hard drive, how do you find and play them? How do you keep the music files from getting lost among all the various files on your computer? This is where organization comes in. When you encoded your Kansas CD using a program such as Windows Media Player or iTunes, the program probably automatically stored your CD files into the “My Music” file in “My Documents” (find it by going into Start Menu, then to My Documents). However, you don’t want to have to go through that involved journey through tabs and mouse-clicks every time want to listen to Kansas.

The advantage of the popular music organization programs that we've mentioned is that they will typically connect to the Internet before they complete the ripping process, and download information for the CD - including song titles, album title, artist, year of release, and even album art. Using this information, the programs will automatically organize your music, and you can sort through your music by artist, title, genre, and more - even album covers. You may have to fine tune these automatic descriptions, as they may not be right for you (let's say you think Lyle Lovett is actually a "Folk" artist and not a "Country" artist, you may need to edit the tag for that song.) See some examples below of screenshots from two of the more popular audio suites, iTunes and WinAmp (both being displayed on a Windows PC.)

Playlists are also handy things to have. You create them, you organize them, you fill them. You can fill them with whatever songs you want and name the playlist whatever you want. For example, say you want a mix of your best songs from the late 70’s. Create a playlist, call it “Best Songs from the 70’s,” and throw in your favorite songs from Kansas, Boston, John Mellencamp, etc. Doing this is easier than it may sound because most media programs have playlists, and it is easy to transfer the songs from playlist to playlist. Many of them, such as iTunes, allow you to drag and drop your music into playlists that you have created, to make it super easy to play your favorite music.

If you make sure that the descriptions of your songs are accurate and complete, and that you have playlists put together so you don't have to fish around for too long to find your favorite song, you're well on your way to organizing your digital music collection!

Another thing to be aware of when organizing your music is to backup your music files. Some people may want to get rid of all their CDs after transferring the files onto their computer’s hard drive. This may be all fine and dandy - until your computer’s hard drive crashes. Then, you may lose all that great music. You don’t have to keep all those CDs if you need the physical space. Simply backup your music files onto an external hard drive. I wrote an article on this subject a while back. You can find it here.

In review, we have briefly described the process of compressing CDs, shown you how to do it, and given some tips and pointers on organizing your music files. Now that you have the essentials to start your digital music library, try new things and experiment your way into finding new ways to improve your music library. Try different music organization programs to see which one works the best for your needs.

Have fun! And above all, enjoy your music!

Original Article Posted at MyDigitalEntertainer.com