Create/Rip MP3 files from your CD

How to create digital music files from your CD – here’s one method. Assumes Windows XP systems.

Creating MP3 files is quite simple, plenty of ways of doing it. Here’s one that works for me, on Windows platforms. It may look daunting thanks to all the detail on this page but it’s really quite simple. Should take no more than 10 minutes to get it working.

Getting “FreeRip”

I use the free MP3 ripper called, quite aptly, FreeRip: Get it free from here. When the dialog box appears to “Open” or “Save” it (the wording may be different depending on your browser) it’s fine to just Open and execute it. We don’t need the installation file.

Installing “FreeRip”

1. Click on through the first few screens that show you license and all the usual stuff.
2. The first screen to pay attention to is the one that allows you to create “Desktop Icon”, “Quick Launch” icon, etc. On this screen, disable whatever you don’t need, but MAKE SURE you disable the “Install the My Global Search Toolbar”.
3. Click on through to the end. On the last screen, you may also want to uncheck “Explore FreeRip community” although leaving this on is not a major mistake.
4. That’s it, it’s done.

One-time customization of FreeRip

FreeRip is quite easy to use, but it’s nice to customize some settings the first time you use it.

Start FreeRip from your START menu, or from the desktop icon if you allowed that to be installed. It should look something like this:
Now, on to customizing. Click on the first menu item called “CD” and then on “Options”.

1. General: Here, uncheck “Show ‘please register’ reminders”. Make sure default format is 1-MP3.
2. Output Path: Make sure you change the “Base Path” to the location where you would like your MP3 files stored. I’ve selected the typical “My Music” inside “My Documents”. As follows:
3. Device: No change.
4. Encoding: Change “Min Bitrate” to 192. This is usually CD quality, 256 only creates a huge file. If you want to rip music mainly to share, 128 MB is fine too.
5. Internet: No change, but make sure “3-Offline Mode” is selected.
6. Extensions: Uncheck “Search bar”. You don’t need it.
7. Freedb: Uncheck “Automatically check freedb when online”, unless you know what you’re doing and would like the feature.
8. That’s it. We’re done. Click on OK.

Using FreeRip

This is all you’ll do from now on. Everytime you want to rip MP3 files from a CD, simply insert the CD and click on CD –> REFRESH. FreeRip will automatically list all the files. You can click on these “tracks” and change their names to whatever the song name is on the CD. Also make sure you enter the Artist and Album name, this will go into the folder that is created for this CD. Next, click on the green tick icon to select all tracks for ripping. Finally, click on the CD icon to start ripping. When done, check your MY MUSIC folder in MY DOCUMENTS, that’s where the new folder should have been created.