I have all my CDs in a database with Artist/Title and wanted to add the songs which I neglected to type in. Now, with a reason to have the songs also listed, I looked at the collection and cringed! I didn't think typing in 500 CD's was going to be fun.

Then I found http://www.freedb.org/ which not only lists the contents of most of the CD's I have but includes the track times.

Now with some interesting techniques with my editor, HTML, and the database, I can almost painlessly add all the album tracks I want.

The only problem is finding that the release of a particular CD I own doesn't have all the bonus songs that were added to other releases. Man there's a lot of differences. Under U2 alone there are well over 300 entries -- many are dupes of course but the number of 'bootlegs' and unofficial releases is amazing! You can really see what you're missing and create a generous shopping list!

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Age is unimportant -- except in cheese

Wow! 500 CDs!? What are you? Some kind of DJ? I bet that doesn't even include the vinyls that you're still holding on to...

I just use the service that comes with Windows Media Player to set up the Artiste / Album / Song titles. But this site is definitely a good resource to keep in my bookmarks.

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How'd you guess? 1500-2000 or so. Eventually I'm going to transfer some to CD.

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Age is unimportant -- except in cheese

I have a similar headache to deal with. If you remember my thread a long while back about dealing w/ Sony and their DRM, I'm now copying all my songs onto my computer from Minidisc. Because I have to use the analog line-in jack, I don't have the luxury of having a database I can use to semi-automate it.

Assuming Audacity doesn't lock up or my computer doesn't fall asleep, I can get maybe 15 songs done in an hour and a half. Then I have to manually type in the title, artist, album, etc. if I can remember it; I sold all my CD's years ago when I put them on Minidisc. I have found iTunes and Amazon helpful for times when I only copied a few songs off a CD or "shared" them off the Internet .

It's a long, painful process and I've got a collection of probably 60 MD's, with many of them holding upwards of 5 hours of music, not counting the songs that are on my laptop that I never put on MD. What fun!

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Common Sense v2.0-Striving to make the world a little bit smarter.

What is your general opinion about this Audacity? It's obvious, from what you describe, that it produces .wav files. Have you set it up with that (LAME?) mp3 encoder?

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For being a free (as in money) program, it works quite well for my purposes. I have not installed the mp3 plugin for it; I output the sound files to .aiff (the Mac/Sun audio standard vs. .wav for MS/IBM but basically the same thing), copy them to iTunes, then convert them to AAC (aka MPEG-4).

IIRC, AAC has a slightly better compression scheme than standard mp3's, giving you better compression while losing less sound. Since I only listen to my music via headphones, computer speakers, or car stereo, I normally don't notice any of the "poor" music quality.

One nice thing about doing this is that I can have higher quality music on my Mac but can still make mp3's when necessary (like taking a CD to work). Converting AAC to MP3 directly in iTunes is probably 10-15x faster than ripping from a CD.

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Common Sense v2.0-Striving to make the world a little bit smarter.

that is nice