I have a bunch of music on Cd's I would like to burn into an external hard drive I purchased. I have real player and music match but am wondering if there is something better, preferrably free. Any ideas?
redhooks

I don't know about free but a great program out there is music collector. You get a free trial. I use movie collector it to manage my movies and it's the best thing I've found. You can google music collector and find it. I think it's $40 but well worth it IMO. You type in the name of the movie and it downloads the covers and all the info that goes with it. Music collector works the same way, I just haven't used it yet.

In terms of actually ripping the music from the CD onto the PC, Windows Media Player is really one of the easiest and best choices. As long as you have Windows, it should be free as well.

Unfortunately, there's not a very good way to rip a very large amount of CDs at a time. It still requires the user to sit there switching CDs, so there's not a way to automate it much quicker.

If you're interested in paying, you could use a service such as LoadPod or Pickled Productions (Google "LoadPod"/"Pickled Productions") to rip all your CDs onto the drive. But these services can get seemingly expensive for how much work you actually do.

As far as music managers (Fixing tags, names, artists, etc) go, I believe MusicBrainz has pretty high standings. Make sure to grab the MP3 Magic Tagger as well if you get this.

Itunes is what I use.......You put in the CD and rip away. And for the external you could just have that as your directory for itunes so it throws the files there.

I've gone back to my roots with good ol' WinAMP. The simple, honest interface is what I'm going for....Just a matter of preference.

One big consideration is the format into which you want to rip them.

There are two basic types of files. Lossy, and lossless.

Then, there are different types of files within each category.

MP3, AAC, etc. are all lossy, compressed files, but tend to be the smallest size, but some resolution and fidelity of the music is lost in the process. How much this is noticeable depends mostly on the bitrate of the file, the codec used, and how critical of a listener you are.

FLAC, Apple Lossless, etc. are lossless, compressed files and tend to be larger than lossy files, but the full fidelity and resolution of the music is retained.

WAV files are the largest of all and are basically exact, uncompressed copies of the CD. The biggest issue with WAV files is that they can't be tagged with category, album, artist, etc. File size can be an issue if you are wanting to put a bunch of files on a portable device.

Some programs will support various file types, some will not. So, IMO, what file type you want to go with may dictate what music programs you use.

Thanks guys- I started using windows media player and it works ok for what I'm looking for.Rock on and good fishing,
redhooks