UKC

Most of my music is on CDs (I know, so yesterday) but my car doesn't play CDs. It does,however, play SD cards. I struggle to make the transfer. In my ignorance I thought I might find I could just drag the CD to the card, but it doesn't seem to do that. Is Spotify in league with Microsoft? Any tips, please?

You’ll need to ‘rip’ them. It’s been quite a few years since I last did it but there was loads of free software that’d convert them to mp3 format which you can then pop on your SD. 

Google - CD rip software - Windows might even have an option. Sometimes you run into copyright issues. Can't remember specifics as it's been a while! 

Thanks guys, I'll have a go. I feel copyright shouldn't be an issue - I paid for the CDs, just want to use them differently.

You can rip in windows media player. Go to the menu / tools / options / rip music.

You can rip your cd's with windows media player, I would suggest flac format as you will keep the CD music quality, then just drag then onto your SD card I would make various directory's under one "music" directory, you could just drag the files from your cd onto the SD card as they are in wav format but very big files.

I vaguely recall though that some cd don’t allow the music to be used other than from the cd. I’ve got at least one cd like that iirc; it clearly said on the packaging though that it was protected.

EAC is the best piece of software on Windows for this job, if you are happy to fiddle with settings. I would also recommend ripping to Flac, it's lossless compression and you don't want to rip a CD collection more than once. You can generate mp3s from your Flac archive down the line.

I doubt that a car stereo can read flac files. Judging from the OP, simplicity is more important than adding steps and it is just for the car. I’d just install iTunes and import as mp3 then copy the mp3s onto card (hopefully by folder as created by iTunes). I only say iTunes because that’s what I use, I am sure other players will do this.

Rog from a legal standpoint copyright is fine as it is for personal use (there is a massive grey area on this admittedly). As another poster said, just very occasionally you will get a CD that won’t allow you to “rip” it. Barely any, IF ANY AT ALL,  of my thousands of CDs do this. It was a bit of a big and controversial thing with Sony/BMG I think circa 2008 and for a few years after. Weirdly I’ve had this once or twice on specific tracks on a CD where most of it was fine. I assume that was a software glitch though. Basically...don’t worry, don’t overthink! 

I did this in 2013 when we rented a Mercedes Sprinter to transport some equipment from Leicester to somewhere near Strasbourg and SD card was the only input to the vehicle stereo. 

Thanks to you and all the above for your efforts on my behalf. Must admit my heart sinks a little when I see all these terms and acronyms I don’t understand. But I can try - next time we get a wet day.

Assuming you have Win 10. 

youtube.com/watch?v=GhxgLDMZJXU&

Good luck. 

Well, it's just adding a few more to CD and SD...

I'd agree with the others who say rip to FLAC. This is a slightly compressed format that uses lossless compression: you can reconstruct the CD file exactly (called bit true), like a zip file. Lossy compression (such as MP3 or AAC) only allows you to reconstruct an approximation of the CD; some details are lost.

A decent media manager/player will allow you to transcode your ripped FLAC files using a lossy compression (keeping the original FLAC), for use in the car; as others have said, it would be unusual for a car player to support FLAC (though more modern car players might).

You don't want to have to rip more than once; it's tedious and time-consuming. Rip lossless, and transcode if you need to.

I have used Exact Audio Copy to rip CDs for a decade. It's free, and runs under Windows. Some people find it hard to configure, but the built-in configuration tool does a good job. The latest version will run two compressors when you rip; one can be lossless, the other lossy; saves the need to do the transcoding step.

Thanks for your help.

This. You wouldn’t scan old negatives and save them as a jpg (I hope) for the same reason. 

Talking of which; any recommendations for neg/slide scanners?

Would you be able to tell the difference though if as the op has indicated they are getting played in the car?

No. But if you've ripped CDs, it's likely you will decide you want to start playing them elsewhere. So rip lossless, and transcode to a portable format.

WMP used to have a disclaimer that basically said you know you might be braking the law by copying, do you still want to go ahead.

If you rip your own music for personal use my understanding is that you are ok. It's the secondary possibility of sharing on a torrent website that's dodgy.

You can always use lossy compression to reduce to quality (and size, which is of course the point) if you have a good starting point, but never the other way round! When digitising media IMO its best to go for the highest quality possible for an "archive", then make lower quality copies as fit for various uses.

Do you think the BBC knows this secret?  I keep wondering if someone has made a monumental cockup with digitising archives.   Whenever they play something from the past which I've heard before, be it Apollo audio or wartime stuff etc etc there is a horrible metallic digital ringing as if it's coming over a bad digital link at an appalling bitrate.  I know the originals were not as bad because I heard them many times over the years.

The sound quality is worse than those old reports from "our Middle East correspondent" over an HF link complete with selective phase distortion.

Got an example or two to point us at? I'm curious.

I guess they have made a trade-off of storage size vs quality. We all have to do that. They've probably got a lot more recordings than my 70k+ tracks.

In the same way that DTV has quite significant visual artefacts, particularly in low light scenes, where the inter-frame interpolation has trouble finding any distinct 'feature' to use as a reference, so things wave about the screen in a rather loose connection with their actual motion.

Whatever you do about file types, don't choose.wma, which I think used to be the windows media player default, but which a lot of CD players don't read

Have you tested the same scenes with interpolation disabled? Assuming that you are referring to your television performing this 

It's a bit hard to turn off interpolation in mpeg; it's a fundamental part of the frame compression mechanism: inter-frame interpolation.

you just have to listen (with good ears) to BBC output that includes past archive clips.  From historic radio broadcasts, Project Apollo audio, various other political stuff.  Quite often it has a horrible metallic sounding ringing typical of poor conversion to digital.  I don't record BBC output routinely so I can only advise you to keep your ears out for examples.  It's something I've noticed for a good few years and it started quite suddenly as if the technology had suddenly changed.

My listening to BBC output is probably 95% on Band II VHF/FM so it's not an artefact of DAB or internet links.  I'm pretty fussy about sound quality - when I record it's usually on a Zoom H2 at CD quality.

Ok a mild misunderstanding. My new TV was doing this additionally to anything already there, as a default setting, which can become confused in low contrast etc, and general advice is to disable it. You appear to be talking about it at source. 

You're specifically referring to radio, right?

yes VHF/FM radio.  not just news output but also cut and pasted stuff into documentary output