Audacity Forum

How may I transfer my CD collection (presently stored in a 101 CD Player Carrousel) to my PC? I don't want to manually copy one CD at a time, but rather put the CD Carrousel player in continous 'Play' and copy all CD's and individual tracks.

only practical way with audacity is to do it one at a time. maybe a few at once. if you record with audacity you have to find the tracks start points and mark them and then export them, unless you just want to play back the whole 118 hour thing from the beginning. that said, audacity will have practical limits on length much less than that so you would have to do it in many groups of a few cds to do it. if you try to rip the tracks directly, your ripping program will likely make you do it one at a time and put them in your pc to do it. do you want to play back specific songs? specific cds? just play the whole thing over from the beginning? that will drive how you do what you do with them.

If you have a stand-alone player, then you would be capturing the high level, stereo show to your computer. Does your computer have Stereo Line-In? Most laptops don't. Macs and Deskside PCs do. The little pink Mic-In doesn't work. For one thing, it's mono, so you only get "left" of the stereo signal.

There are a number of posts from people trying to capture shows beyond six hours and it's not easy. Particularly if Audacity crashes, you will be sweeping out shards and fragments from the drive for a while.

There is that label thing. Music CDs do not have song labels on the disk, so you'll need to type them in one at a time.

You're facing the same problem that people with killer vinyl collections have. Do you really want to spend the rest of your life transferring music? I have some disks out of print, but for the normal human, an iTunes subscription is well worth it.

Koz

All of which begs the obvious question - why are you bothering to record your CDs rather than ripping them?

There are several pieces of free software which will let you rip CDs. What format you rip them to depends on your application. If you are wanting to use an iPod you will probably want AAC - or MP3 for an MP3 player. Or if you are aiming to store your music on a server at lossless qulaity then WAV is what you probably want. Judging from the title of your posting I'm guessing that you want a copy of your CD libary on your Pc to play it on there. If that is the case then I would recommend iTunes - you don't need to buy an iPod to get iTunes, you can download it for free from the Apple site and the Windows version works well. IMHO it makes an excellent PC jukebox.

And some applications will acccess the Gracenote CDDB database, if you are connected to t'interweb, to get the metadata like CD name, artiste, song names etc. iTunes does this for example.

But recording them is definitely not the way to go - it will take you far too much time - believe me, I know as I am one of those folk that Koz refers to with a large LP & tape collection. I spent two and a half years on that - and now I've recently started on my wife's 250-350 LPs - I expect to finish sometime in 2012!

WC

wow
i cut my 600+ LPs down to about 25-30 which i really want to hear again and that I am going to put on cd
and about 10 or so cassettes

now in a few years what are we going to do with all our cds when they are totally obsolete and some newfangled holographic device is the latest fad technology everybody supports
library of congress has books thousands of years old that can still be read. electric/digital stuff does not last long at all. i threw away my 8" floppies, then it was my 5" floppies, soon i will have to dump my 3.5" diskettes, and soon it will be the cds.
if we could print on paper all our music and have some device that could read it (why not a laser based one like they use to read LPs now to avoid damaging the groove?) then we would never have to do another media conversion again.

sony would probably try to make it illegal like they did with the early VCRs, and as I recall later with another technology.