How to Rip Music Off a CD for Editing in Audacity

Disclaimer:

This cheat sheet is for educational purposes only. It in no way condones infringing copyright laws. Copyright infringement is when a copyrighted work is “reproduced, distributed, performed, publicly displayed, or made into a derivative work without the permission of the copyright owner.”

With that out of the way, let’s look at audio editing!

I. Ripping a Track from the CD

First, this cheat sheet will focus on ripping a track from a cd using Windows Media Player 12 in Windows 7. If you already have a track ripped and in a different file format like .wav or .mp3, then you can skip this process and move on to step II.

Place the music CD into the computer. Auto detection should pull up a screen similar to this:

Choose the option “Play Audio CD using Windows Media Player”. When you choose that option, you’ll come across a screen like the one below:

This is the “Now Playing” mode of Windows Media Player 12. Notice the green highlighted circle in the upper right corner. This is the “Rip CD” option. It automatically rips the CD. Since our settings for ripping aren’t set the way we want them, we will go with the red highlighted circle. It is the option to move to “Library” mode. Select this option.

Now, in Library mode, there are several things to examine. First, this CD has been identified by Media Player 12 with artist info automatically added; naming the tracks and album, even adding the album cover. This is not always the case and you may open a cd that is quite generic and all the tracks are labeled “Track 1, Track 2”…, and so on. That’s fine. The mechanics of ripping the cd aren’t affected.

Notice the red highlight. It shows the option “Rip CD”. Look at the tracks. In this example, all the tracks are checked, therefore all the tracks will be ripped from the CD. The check boxes give the flexibility of picking which songs to rip. The green highlight is the “Rip settings” option for how you would like to rip the cd.

Here’s a detailed look at “Rip Settings”:

Under “Format” are the options of what kind of file format you may want to rip your CD to. For our example, we will choose MP3. Audacity will read .mp3 or .wav, so either one is fine to pick. “Audio Quality” is defaulted to 128Kbps. Changing these settings to higher quality will also make the music file larger, so take caution when doing this. The rest of the options are self-explanatory.

After options are set, start ripping!

(NOTICE: This may take a few moments)

This example shows all the tracks being ripped from the CD. Notice under “Rip Status”, when a file is ripped, it states that it is “Ripped to Library”.

Question: Where is the library?

Media Player 12 creates a folder under Libraries -> Music by default. In this example, open Windows Explorer or click on the Windows logo button in the bottom left corner and select “Computer”. Under “Libraries” is the sub-folder “Music”. There’s a folder labeled appropriately for the music that was just ripped (i.e. “3 Doors Down”).

Opening the folders brings us to the ripped files:

Remember, the File format is in .mp3.

I. Editing an Audio File in Audacity

To start editing a specific audio file like the ones that were just ripped, Open Audacity.

With Audacity open, select “File” and “Open…” now select “Libraries” icon on the left side under “Look in:” Select “Music” and then the appropriate folder where the files were ripped earlier. This will open the song for editing:

From here, Audacity will allow you to edit the song, tailoring it to your needs. Do you have any questions about Audacity? Click on “Help” then “Manual (in web browser)” for a how-to on using Audacity. Thanks!

Special thanks to the owner of the 3 doors down CD found in an old computer. The disc came in handy for this presentation. 