playlists, Winamp, CD's and 'puters..
1. You pop a CD in the puter and winamp wakes up and the CD plays (because it's set in the preferences to automatically play CD's when they're inserted) - you want to keep the playlist but it disappears when the CD is removed.. that's because the CD ain't THERE no more!
2. You have a bunch of MP3's on your computer organised exactly how you want them to play, but the list goes whenever you stick in a CD - that again is because the CD is set to autoplay with winamp and it immediately refreshes the list and you lose your playlist :-(
3. You've got all these CD's and you want to rip your favourite tracks to the puter so you can listen to them any time you want, but you don't know how..
4. You have lots of MP3's and you want to burn them to a CD (so you can play like a 1000 songs through the DVD player/Stereo at your next wild all night 'don't forget your underpants' party ) ..but again you don't know how
5. You have all your MP3's on your puter but you'd like to burn a normal audio CD that plays in any old CD player, and rearrange them into your own order..
Second you'll need an MP3 'ripper' - something to steal the Audio tracks from the CD's and convert them into MP3's (making them really small) - if you have audiocatalyst on your puter then you're fine, if not get audiograbber for free from here
Next you'll want a burner program like CDburnerXPPro (and a CD or DVD burner)
or Deepburner - and deepburner has it's OWN inbuilt MP3 ripper
ALL these programs have very helpful FAQ's and guides as to how to use them on their homepages - read them, they're very helpful and once you start tinkering with the programs you'll understand a lot more of what's said and you'll be able to DO more :)
On to winamp and playlists. Assuming you already have a few MP3's on your computer that you've been listening to and want to save in the order you've arranged them.
Saving Playlists in winamp is EASY! Once you've got the tracks you want in your playlist, make sure you save it - To save a playlist:
Open the File menu and click 'Save Playlist'.
The Save Playlist dialog box opens. Choose a folder where you want to save your playlist (make it somewhere easy to get to**). In the File name field, type a name for your playlist (really cool shit 1.M3U, really angry shit 14.M3U, etc )
In the 'Save as' type drop down list, choose M3U Playlist or PLS Playlist. M3U is fine in most situations. Click Save to save your playlist.
DONE!
Ripping MP3's:
OK, now start up audiograbber or audiocatalyst.. this will scout your computer and find the CD automatically popping up a list of all the tracks with little ticks beside the tracks (if no ticks, add them, remove them for tracks you don't want).
There is a settings menu which lets you normalise the tracks (makes sure all your tracks come out at the same volume - important stuff otherwise different tracks from different CD's will be all over the shop!). Set the encode bitrate to 'variable' - this means high quality sounds will be recorded well, but space is saved on the simple bits by recording them at low quality.
Hit the encode button and off it will go, ripping the tracks to MP3's and sticking them in a folder somewhere.. familiarise yourself with where these tracks get put or you'll have a time finding them ! If you can't find where they went search your computer for *.MP3 and pay attention to where the files got saved.
Find the folder and rename the individual files appropriately, something like
No Sleep Till Hammersmith (live) - Motorhead.MP3 is good ..
Britny Spears - Like I'm Falling.MP3 is bad... on so many levels..
I suggest once you've ripped ANY song, you create a folder called MP3's on your desktop and stick ALL your songs in there. Add songs from theis folder to the winamp playlist by dragging and dropping the songs into winamp. (**keep your playlists here too)
that bits done :-)
Lets presume now that's as far as you want to go and you won't burn them to a CD - you'll just be listening to them on the beige box - again fire up winamp and the old playlist will be there still and will play the songs exactly as before UNLESS you've moved the files. Drop any new songs into the list and when you're happy with the compilation - save the playlist.
Burning the MP3's to a CD is pretty simple using the burner programs above, just open the burning program, choose to create a DATA CD (multisession if it asks, as you may want to add tracks later), grab all the tracks you want from your MP3 folder and drop them into the section of the burner program where the files are to be listed then set it to burn the CD. Since most MP3s are like 4 or 5mb in size, you'll fit 150 songs or so on a data CD, a dvd will carry 1000 songs.
If you happen to want them to play in a particular order, they won't - they'll go in alphabetically unless you number them first.. but since you dont want to foul up your playlists, copy all the MP3's to another folder first THEN rename them, like this ..
01 No Sleep Till Hammersmith - Motorhead.MP3
02 Fire - Crazy World of Arthur Brown.MP3
03 Downtown - Petula Clark.MP3
05 Neil Diamond - Crunchy Granola Suite.MP3 etc.
then drop them on the burner browser window and they'll be arranged in numerical order - I know it's a pain but no-one's yet worked out a way to save stuff out of order - live with it.
yay, that bits done :)
The other thing as mentioned above that you may want to do is to create an Audio CD, one that can be played in a normal CD player that has only 10 or so songs on it. This is pretty simple IF your burning program does such things - most freeware does not, but some do (like Deepburner). When you first launch the program the wizard will ask you what sort of CD you want to create, select AUDIO CD. the file browser will be empty - drag your MP3's to this section and note along the bottom the data bar will suggest how much space each track will take up, they will be large, audio tracks are bigger than mp3's. Keep adding tracks until your CD is full, or until you're happy with the tracks selected. Now burn (write) the CD - the program will whir away for a bit while it converts the tracks to the appropriate format then it will spit out the burnt CD ready to go.
there, that wasn't too painful was it !
Of course these MP3's can be easily put on your portable MP3 players too by connecting your player to your puter where it will be recognised as a removable disk (open 'My Computer and you'll see a hard drive you never had before!). Just pick the MP3 tracks you want (hold the 'control' key on your keyboard and click each track you want) then copy and paste them to the MP3 player (the removable drive). Done.
10:17 a.m. - 2005-10-11
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