Pulling Music from Compact Discs (CDs)

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.

Airplane Tickets Printed or on Your Phone

I do a lot of travel for my job and am coming up on having flown over 2 Million miles. When it comes time to print out a ticket for a flight there are 2 options. The first is to actually use an old-fashioned printer and print a paper ticket. The second is to send a QR code to a smartphone and use that to board the plane. One would think it is a no-brainer and the smartphone is the way to go. For the technically savy, I would agree. My preference is to print a paper ticket though.

Yes I know that my seat may be updated between the time I check in and when I actually board my flight. If I used the airline's app, the seat is automatically changed and I don't have to pay attention to the monitors in the terminal. I also don't have to worry about losing my ticket. As I have said, the smartphone ticket seems to be the way to go.

The problem is that smartphones slow the boarding of the plane. I'm not sure how so many people can have such problems getting the ticket scanner to read a phone screen but it happens. I have waited for several minutes behind passengers who don't know you need to turn up the brightness so the QR code can be read properly. I have also seen countless travelers not able to find their ticket on the phone. Then of course there is the dreaded screen lock. You have your ticket ready to scan only to have the screensaver kick in and blank out the screen as you go to scan it. Ultimately I have found that pulling out a paper ticket speeds things up and gets me onto the plane quicker.

Creating Your Own QR Code

Creating your own quick reader or QR code is actually very simple. I have been creating a YouTube video every week for the past few weeks and in an effort to drive traffic to my channel, I created a QR code and am having them printed on business cards. I can then hand out those cards as I ride up the chairlift with other skiers interested in my Top 5 Ski Areas of North America video series.

A QR code is simply a 2-dimensional bar code that translates into text. You could make a QR code for your name but it is more useful to make one for your website. In my case I looked at the URL for my YouTube channel and dropped it into a QR-Code generator that I found doing an Internet search. I didn't feel the need to add a logo in the middle or anything fancy like that but had the option if I desired.

Once I had the QR code, I saved it as an image file and can now add it to any number of places. I originally thought about making my own business cards and picked up some Avery printable sheets that could be separated into 10 cards per page. Unfortunately my color laser printer jams with thick paper and so I had to print them using my ink-jet printer that I really only use as a scanner. The ink tends to run when it gets wet and so it is not something I want to carry around in my jacket pocket on a snowy day. Instead I went to Vistaprint and had 100 cards printed inexpensively.

Today I spent my morning skiing at Snowbird and handed out a few of my sample cards that I created. When other skiers find out I am making videos they are interested in watching them and having a QR code makes them easy to view. As the QR code is for my channel and not a specific video, I don't need to update the cards every time I release a new video. In a few weeks, I'll be able to see if they help drive any traffic.