My youngest son and his wife gave my granddaughters a music player for Christmas. It is interesting in that it comes with paper cards with QR codes on them. When you want to play specific songs, you insert the card into the music player and it will play the songs. You can buy cards for popular artists or you can make your own with music you have purchased. My son knows I have a large number of Disney CDs and asked if I could help him bring the music over to the music player. I'm not listening to the CDs so I figured I would help him out.
Now I work for Sony which owns Sony Music and pirating music is a terminable offense. I like my job and so I would not make copies of music unless it is legal to do so. With CDs you are allowed to make a limited number of copies for your personal use. Effectively you can add them to your library, which is what I am technically doing. I'm not sharing the music with a large number of friends nor am I stealing it. I purchased the CDs and simply wish to share the songs with my family.
My son lives in Ohio and I could have shipped all of the Disney CDs to him through the mail. Unfortunately that would cost money and take time. We wanted to do a quick experiment to make sure the process works and so I converted the music to MP3 files. The point of this post is to share how I did that.
Step 1 - Make sure you have a CD player connected to your computer. While every computer used to come with a CD player, none of my current generation of laptops includes one. Fortunately I have a USB CD drive and I can connect it to any computer with a USB port.
Step 2 - Convert the songs from CDDA format to MP3. It has been over a decade since I have pulled songs off a CD and turned them into MP3 files. I had to look up how to do this on my Mac. While there are a number of software programs out there I could have downloaded to help with this process, I just put the CD into the drive and it pulled up Apple's music player. I then had the option to copy the files into my computer's music library. I then had 4 options for different music formats and I selected MP3. The music program stores the files in a sub-directory under the "music" folder for my computer account. It didn't take too much work to find the MP3 files.
Step 3 - Transfer the files to my son. All of the music files appear in a folder or directory. I just had to send my son the directory for each CD I added to my library. The easiest way to do this is with the help of Google drive (drive.google.com). I created a directory there and gave my son access and then just copied the music to it. I have a gigabit Internet connection and so it only took about 20 seconds to copy an entire CD.
Step 4 - Delete all unneeded copies of the music. As I am loaning the music to my granddaughters, it wouldn't be honest to keep the music on my computer and so I deleted it from the music app. I also deleted it from Google drive after my son downloaded the files.
It is nice to see that Apple recognizes that people want to create music libraries and they have not hindered the ability to do so. While I enjoy listening to streaming music, I actually own a lot of CDs and may add a lot of my favorite songs directly to my phone and computer. Then I can get away from those pesky ads on Spotify and listen to the music I already own.
No comments:
Post a Comment