Digitizing my CD collection
With the recent acquisition of an external 250 GB hard disk, I’ve finally decided to take the plunge and digitize my entire audio CD collection. In this blog post I just wanted to share how I go about doing that.
The tool I use for converting audio to digital is GoldWave (together with LAME). They provide a fully functional, free ‘try-out’ version, that includes access to the wonderful CD Reader tool, which can convert analog audio tracks to a digital format of choice.
I convert my CD tracks to MP3 files (I think the choice for this format is quite obvious). In the settings I select a frequency of 44100 Hz, and a bitrate of 160 kbps, in stereo. These settings will lead to MP3 files that are of a good quality, yet will not become too large in size.
One thing I really love about the CD Reader tool is the ‘Get Titles’ button. When clicking this, GoldWave will contact freedb.org and retrieve the correct album name and song titles, which — needless to say — saves you a lot of typing.
Going about it this way, converting any CD collection to MP3 is a relatively easy and quick process. An entire CD will be digitized in about 15-20 minutes and ends up at ~60 MB in file size.
