Hints & tips

Music

How do I decide what format to rip CDs to?

If you want to make a compilation to burn onto a CD then it’s the uncompressed WAV format. But the files are huge. FLAC is the obvious choice if you want to store in a compressed but lossless format.

For most people it’s going to be a heavily compressed format. I’ve heard Ogg Vorbis is the best technically but it’s not yet caught on - a pity, as it's completely royalty free. It will play on my music player but not on my main CD player. Whatever the format, avoid music tied up with DRM (Digital Rights Management). With DRM your flexibility is highly restricted.

Many iPod users go with the default format in iTunes, AAC (m4a). This is a pretty good format technically but is a bad choice because so few devices support it other than iPods. Eg a radio or wifi receiver that can play music stored on your computer will probably not play AAC.

I ripped our extensive CD collection to wma format. Again a decent format but I made a double mistake – I ripped most of the CDs at the compact 64Kbps setting because our first music players were low capacity. Then I switched to wma at 128kbps but now I’ve realised wma itself was a mistake – it will not play on iPods and various other devices.

The choice has to be good old MP3. It plays on absolutely anything. Sure the file sizes are bigger but if you choose the VBR (Variable Bit Rate) option it’s not that bad and music players and hard disks get bigger every year. I’ve settled for high quality VBR MP3 from now on – the files are around 60% bigger than decent quality wma or AAC but if anything sound better. And I don’t care too much about the size – it’s flexibility I want. My stored music has to work on my next music player, my next mobile phone, my first wifi radio, my next car stereo and so on. There are patents attracting MP3 royalties but only for commercial implementations.

There is a slight problem in that Windows Media Player doesn’t rip MP3 with VBR (WMP v10 or 11). But it’s a horribly bossy program and there are plenty of other options. iTunes does MP3 with VBR and I use the superb, free AudioGrabber with the equally free Lame encoder.

Set to MP3 VBR 1 (its second highest quality setting) the music files are still compact enough (around 1.5Mb per minute) and sound excellent. Played on my big hi-fi and speakers and flicking between the MP3 and the original CD track the only difference I could detect was a slightly clearer stereo sound stage from the CD. So I’ve now got quite a job gradually re-ripping hundreds of CDs.

How do I get music from my CDs onto my iPod?

Run iTunes. Before you rip your first CD go to Edit, Preferences, Import Settings. Change it from AAC to MP3, Custom then select VBR. Experiment to get the best balance between file size and sound quality (probably erring on the high quality side if anything). The settings shown produce pretty high quality audio files, of roughly 1.5Mb per minute of audio, depending on the type of music. Then load a CD and import some or all tracks via iTunes, which then lets you move music on and off your iPod.

The Advanced tab will show you where iTunes aims to store your music – the default is a bit hidden, eg:

Once you’ve ripped your entire CD collection and maybe added a few more tracks you bought online (try to get DRM free and MP3 for flexibility) you can start creating playlists and experimenting with different ways of synchronising your iPod (assuming it will not take all your music at once).

Should I choose an iPod as my music player?

Up to you. Music is consumed in so many ways now, eg increasingly on mobile phones.

My main aim is to be future proofed, eg by storing music as MP3 rather than wma or AAC. iPods and the iTouch are nicely designed but I've never had one, preferring much cheaper players from Creative, Sandisk etc. iPods have two other problems (after price) for me - you cannot just slot in a new battery when the first one fails and they tie you to the iTunes program with its big brother tendencies. I far prefer being in charge, simply dragging folders across to a music player.

How do I listen to internet radio?

You can listen through a browser such as Internet Explorer or Firefox. iTunes (free to download) has an excellent internet radio mode – make a new playlist and drag favourite stations into it. Then shrink it to a little on-screen radio.

Nowadays there is also a growing choice of radios that will access internet radio stations via your wifi router. The Roberts on the right will connect wirelessly to your router and thence to lots of internet radio stations. It will also play music from your computer (MP3 or wma but not Apple AAC).

My favourite source of music on the internet is spotify. Once signed up you can listen to it like an internet radio (but with lots of choice over genre and era and you can skip to the next track anytime).

Even better, you can listen to an entire album – not just the start of each track – as long as you don’t mind the occasional adverts. Brilliant! And yes, I bought the CD below at once, having listened to it online. But spotify seems to have stopped taking on new free subscribers, funded by adverts.

How to I pipe music stored on my computer round the house?

There are some very fancy and expensive wireless systems out there but I do something much simpler.

Our laptop has our entire CD collection on it plus it can play spotify and other internet sources wirelessly. We've got five music systems round the house which accept line in/aux, via cheap 3.5mm stereo jack to phono or jack to jack cables. They range from a big hifi system covering the ground floor (with two sets of speakers) to a portable mono bathroom radio via mini hifi systems. So we take the laptop (or a music player loaded from it) to where we want to listen and plug it in. Simple and very low cost. If we are playing music ripped from our CDs it's just a matter of dragging tracks or albums onto the nice little VLC media player.

How do I capture plays, music etc off the internet?

Podcasts are intended to be downloaded and listened to later, perhaps on a music player. Streamed internet radio, plays etc are more intended for current listening but the streamed audio can also be stored with the right software to capture it to an MP3 or WAV (CD) file. You can load MP3 files onto a music player to listen to on the way to work or burn a radio play to a CD to play in the car.

There are a few free recorders around but this is one area where it’s probably better to go for paid software such as Total Recorder (v8 was updated for Windows 7 and works beautifully) or Replay Radio.

Making such recordings is a bit of a grey area legally but if it’s just time shifting and for personal use there shouldn’t be any problems. The only theoretical problem is that copyright holders can sometimes be paranoid and their terms and conditions may try to ban routine time shifting for personal use. Even the BBC, totally owned/funded by us UK BBC licence fee payers, tries to restrict us to listening again to plays etc tethered to a computer rather than motoring along the highway. Duh!

Radiotracker is another interesting way of getting music off the net, supposedly completely legally - you tell it what to look for and it scours internet radio stations worldwide and downloads matching tracks it finds to MP3, trying to fade out the disc jockeys talking over the beginning and end of tracks.

How do I edit audio tracks?

You may need to do this because you want to make a quiet track louder on a compilation, to split a huge sound file sucked in off an old vinyl LP into separate tracks or just to fade out the self indulgent last four minutes on a golden oldie track (sorry, Bob - a friend/fan was scandalised).

For these sorts of jobs I use the wonderful and totally free Audacity editor:

Note that it edits MP3 and wav (CD format) but not wma or AAC. Its help says "Audacity cannot import or export files in WMA, AAC, ...or most other proprietary formats, or any kind of Digital Rights Management (DRM) protected file, including many purchased online such as on iTunes... Because of licensing and patent restrictions, we are not allowed to add these formats to Audacity." That reinforces my policy of having all digital audio in CD or MP3 format. I'm no longer so short of disc or music player capacity that I'd want to go proprietary ever again. I much prefer to be future proofed and not tied in to any supplier.

How do I edit the hidden track information?

MP3, AAC and wma tracks have hidden information in them showing artist, genre, album etc. That helps your music player offer various navigation options. On my Sansa Clip+ music player it works well with the ID3 tags in MP3 tracks but not with wma tracks, another reason I'm re-ripping all our CDs to MP3.

I used to use Windows Media Player to rip CDs to wma but I found it very buggy. In particular, after telling it never to alter existing tracks' tags it would silently scan my ripped music collection, corrupting track tags as it went. It would change Bob Dylan, Desire, Hurricane to UNKNOWN ARTIST, UNKNOWN ALBUM, UNKNOWN TRACK - without ever asking! The only solution I found was to make all my tracks read only. But that made deleting them from music players difficult so now I've found a much better solution - I've managed to turn off Windows Media Player (You cannot uninstall it) in Vista (difficult) and Win7 (easy). Using VLC, Songbird etc instead works much better.

What if you want to edit the hidden information? I've needed to do this when I've converted vinyl LPs to CD and also when I've wanted to change the genre for a whole album (I tend to stick to Rock or Classical as genres rather than Rock, Folk-Rock, Indie, Alt-Country etc). Windows Media Player can apparently edit ID3 tags and with iTunes you just right click a track (or multiple tracks) and choose Get Info. With Win7 you can even edit some ID3 fields from Windows Explorer. But my favourite ID3 editor is the free Media Monkey program shown below. It makes editing ID3 tags very easy, by track or album.

How do I play my music in a car?

That's still where CDs come in - it's surprising how few car stereos yet have a line in to plug in your music player. I have tried an FM transmitter. It can be good to play your music to a hifi system when on holiday but I've found it fairly useless in a car. There always seems to be background noise and as you travel across the country local stations keep appearing on your carefully selected empty frequency.

My latest hifi CD player will play data CDs with hours of MP3 (not wma or AAC) music on them but the car just plays music CDs or FM radio.