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Getting Your CDs into MP3s

First, a short note: If you're not really clear on what an MP3 is, you should probably search around on google and read some background information on them.  If you even have a vague idea, you should be able to read all of this page without much trouble.  If you know exactly what an MP3 file is, you still may find some interesting information on this page that most people just don't know because no one really talks about it in the computer press, unfortunately.

It is a sad fact that most (all) commercial jukebox players, like Windows Media Player and MusicMatch Jukebox just don't make very high quality MP3 files from your CDs.  In the case of Windows Media Player, you won't even get MP3s unless you pay money to get a separate MP3 encoder, because the people who developed MP3 (Fraunhofer and Philips) want royalties for developing the technology, even though WMP is free.  (Note: an MP3 encoder is just a program that compresses a big audio file, like a WAV, or some song from a CD, into a small MP3 file, and hopefully retains most of the quality).

Why don't they make good MP3 files?  Well, the main problem is that the commercial MP3 encoders (the encoders that commercial software companies can license for use in their programs) aren't that fantastic.  Yes, it's true that not every MP3 encoder is built alike.

Which MP3 encoder is the best?  Well, it's called LAME, which stands for LAME Ain't an MP3 Encoder, which is, of course, a lie.  LAME is an MP3 encoder, and not only is it the best, but it's completely free, and Open Source to boot (in other words, everyone can see how it was done and make any changes they want to it).  For some reason, commercial applications tend not to support Open Source efforts.  At any rate, the LAME homepage itself refers to LAME as merely "an educational tool for learning about MP3 encoding."  In other words, they're trying to avoid getting sued.  And unfortunately, it's a little difficult to download LAME, because of the royalties that Fraunhofer and Philips want.  In fact, the LAME home page, http://www.mp3dev.org/mp3/, doesn't have any links to download LAME at all.

Luckily for us, LAME is downloadable as a full working tool from many places on the internet.  If you search on Google for "lame mp3 download", you'll find lots of sites, but most of them will just have links to the source code for LAME.  This is no good for you.  You're going to need the compiled Windows LAME DLL files.  Here's a site that had them at the writing of this help file: http://mitiok.cjb.net/.  You may have to search around a bit for the proper file -- just remember: Windows DLL.

But wait!  You can't just rip MP3s with LAME.  After all, LAME is just the encoder.  You're going to need a program that can take your CDs and turn the songs on them into computer files that can be sent to LAME for encoding.  And I've got the program for you.  Again, it's totally free, and it's absolutely the best of its kind, because it can read even incredibly scratched CDs.  That program is called Exact Audio Copier, and, unlike LAME, it's available from its homepage: http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/.

Once you've downloaded LAME and EAC, you may need some help in setting up Exact Audio Copier to use LAME.  In fact, you're probably going to want to use a lot of EAC's powerful features, but you're probably not going to have much of a clue where to start with EAC's many powerful configuration options.  Thankfully, there are tons of tutorials on the internet that you can read.  Just go to Google and search for "LAME EAC tutorial" (without the quotes, of course).  Here's one that was around at the time I wrote this help file: http://www.ping.be/satcp/eac12.htm

Now, you may be reading all this with some skepticism, wondering how in the world two completely free software packages could be better than anything commercially written.  (Hey, c'mon... EphPod is free, right?)  Well, the sad fact is that in the world of commercial software, being the best is rarely directly equivalent to making the most money.  You only need to be adequate and have a good marketing campaign.

Still not convinced?  Well, it will be hard to find someone who is knowledgeable and cares about computer music who has tried LAME who isn't still using it.  Ditto with EAC.  And you can search the net and see the comparisons -- they're both just heads and tails above the competition.

One final tip -- you should use EAC's feature to "Get Song Info from FreeDB" so that you don't have to manually type in the CD's information.  And if EAC is running too slowly on your mint-perfect-condition CDs, just up the reading speed -- EAC is default set on a speed that will carefully read scratched CDs, not perfect ones.

Go on now and Load Your First Song...