Cds to Mp3

[wintersundog]

Hello Everyone

I am thinking about converting most/all of my cd collection to Mp3 and getting a wind-up Mp3 player . How many songs can i get on an Mp3 player? Do i need any special kit? I know absolutely nothing about this! There are about 700 cds to do .

Many Thanx in advance

WSD

[Odsox]

It depends of course on the capacity of the MP3 player, but a rule of thumb is for 500 tracks to 1Gb, or 50 CD's for 1Gb.
I have no idea on the capacity of a 'wind-up' MP3 player, but a reasonable sized 'ordinary' one is 2Gb or 4Gb, so a 4Gb would hold roughly 200 CDs, or to put it another way you would need over 14Gb for your collection.
You can get MP3 players this size and bigger but they tend to have miniature hard drives to store the songs on and I doubt that they are available in wind-up types.
You almost certainly have to have a computer to do this, so the capacity is not really a problem as you can store all your tracks on the computer and change the tracks on your MP3 when you feel like listening to something different.

Assuming you have a computer running some form of Windows, then it's all fairly straight forward. Windows Media Player will rip (copy) the tracks off the CDs and put them on your computers hard drive and will save them as .WMA (Windows Media Audio). By far the easiest way is to leave them like this as all MP3 players will play WMA tracks as well.
Then plug your MP3 player into the USB port of your computer and copy them over.

Hope I've not confused you too much.

[wintersundog]

Thanx very much Odsox , not confusing at awl , i get the gist. Nice one

[Big Al]

I'v tried various portalble players over the years and found byfar the best for me is the I pod. now i'm not a brand junkie by any means but they bounce really well !!!

I starterd off with the 2 gb one and as my music collection grew I've graduated to the 60 gb one. I've got over 800 cds and much more in the forms of live recordings and i've only just filled it up.

you will be thrilled if anything like me as I renamed the ipod the player for music I forgot I had....

[johnM]

This may be too late, but if possible hang on to your original CDs, as MP3 and other formats such as AAC, which is Apple's propriety format for the ipod, are lossy in that they aren't quite as good as the original copy once compressed.

Although for most needs and headphones the compressed version is more than adequate.

[Big Al]

This may be too late, but if possible hang on to your original CDs, as MP3 and other formats such as AAC, which is Apple's propriety format for the ipod, are lossy in that they aren't quite as good as the original copy once compressed.

Although for most needs and headphones the compressed version is more than adequate.

I'm even worse John M, I buy 180/200g vinyl records now as well......