First off, some reasons to take this road: iTunes is a decent audio encoder, and it’ll get your music from point A—the CD—to points B, C and D—your computer, your MP3 player and your backup drive—without much trouble. But it’ll do it with a less-than-great encoder, with occasionally inconsistent tagging, with album art that’ll only work on Apple devices, and without support for the best lossless audio formats and MP3 encoding options, which you probably want, whether you know it or now.

In short, the ripping process deserves a little more care than iTunes or Windows Media player can give it. You can pay people for this, which feels dumb and wasteful, or you can do it yourself. It’s not difficult, at all. Here’s what you do:

Get Your Software

The first step to ditching iTunes is to, well, ditch iTunes. What we’re looking for is ripping software that offers more encoding options than iTunes, but more importantly, a better encoder. And as far as MP3 encoders go, the open source LAME is as good as they get. There’s plenty of software for both Mac and PC that leverages this encoder, but here are two programs that do lots, lots more.

Mac OS X: Max
From the makers:

When extracting audio from compact discs, Max offers the maximum in flexibility to ensure the true sound of your CD is faithfully extracted. For pristine discs, Max offers a high-speed ripper with no error correction. For damaged discs, Max can either use its built-in comparison ripper (for drives that cache audio) or the error-correcting power of cdparanoia.

What this translates to: Great error reduction, fantastic sound quality and tons and tons of encoding options—not that you really need those to do a good rip, but hey, they can’t hurt. On top of all this, Max is also a great file converter, in case you’ve got some delinquent WMA files scattered around.

Windows: Exact Audio Copy
From the makers:

Exact Audio Copy is a so called audio grabber for audio CDs using standard CD and DVD-ROM drives. The main differences between EAC and most other audio grabbers are
• It is free (for non-commercial purposes)
• It works with a technology, which reads audio CDs almost perfectly. If there are any errors that can’t be corrected, it will tell you on which time position the (possible) distortion occurred, so you could easily control it with e.g. the media player

What this translates to: The best error correction money can buy, for free. Seriously: Audiophiles swear by exact audio copy, and with good reason. You’ll have to download your own LAME encoder before you can enable MP3 encoding in the program options, but you can do that right here without a problem. Additionally, setting up tagging, which you’ll definitely want to do, takes an extra, albeit easy, step.

If you want to take a simpler route you can just download CDex, which supports LAME and tagging databases out of the box, and produces results nearly as good as—if not as good as—Exact Audio Copy.

On both platforms, you’re going to have a lot of personal decisions to make. How do you want to organise your files? How do you want to name them? Unlike iTunes, these apps don’t pressure your to store your music in a certain way—it’s up to you to archive as you please. Both offer plenty of options for storage and organisation, easily available in their Preferences menus:
As I said, this one’s up to you.

Choose Your File Type MP3: If you’re encoding only for portable devices, not concerned about archiving perfect copies of your music, hate hate hate audiophiles, think FLAC and OGG just sound like gurgling baby noises, you’re probably going to want to stick with MP3s. Yes, there are other formats that offer a better size-to-sound ratio, and no, it’s not open source or anything, but for pure compatibility, control and encoder choice, it’s hard—no, impossible—to beat MP3. And if you set up your encoder correctly, MP3s can sound great.

It’s tough to pick the optimal MP3 bitrate on your own, since at a certain point, differences in sound quality seem to come down as much to psychological factors as to actual clarity. Thankfully, we’ve crowd-sourced this issue and come up with a rough guide: 256kbps is, it seems, where people just can’t really tell the difference. In practical terms, this means setting your encoder to these settings:
That’s no higher than 256kbps VBR—for variable bitrate, which modifies the amount of information in your file’s stream according to how much is needed, and saves you space without sacrificing quality—with the highest (read: slowest) available encoding option. For almost everyone, in almost all circumstances, this’ll do, and it sure beats iTunes default 160kbps constant bitrate rips.

FLAC: If archiving is your intention—as in, digitising your music without losing any quality, no matter how imperceptible—then you’re going to want to go lossless. And of the lossless formats, FLAC is the most well-supported in terms of software and hardware, albeit not on any of Apple’s products—though iTunes can be made to play nice with FLAC with a few simple tweaks.

But don’t fret! The beauty of FLAC music is that it can be converted to other lossless formats, like Apple’s iPod-compatible Apple Lossless, without losing any quality, or compressed into MP3s without having to worry about muddy transcoding. Think of them as CDs without the physical disc, basically.

Embed Your Album Art

This is something else that iTunes doesn’t do right: album art. Sure, it’ll find it, but when you transfer all your music to a non-iPod music player, your art is gone. Why? It’s because iTunes stores the album art in a separate database, rather than in the song file’s ID3 tags, where it should be. On Mac OS, assuming you’re doing your listening in iTunes, which is pretty handy at fetching album art, you can just use one of Doug’s famous iTunes scripts to write said album art directly to your MP3 files. Here’s how you install it:

To install the files/folders, drag the items in the disc image window to your [username]/Library/iTunes/Scripts/ folder. If there is no folder named “Scripts” there, create one and drag the files into it. AppleScripts placed in this folder will be listed in the iTunes Script menu. You do not have to install the .rtf/.rtfd documentation file in the “Scripts” folder, but it’s as convenient a place as any.

For Windows users, Lifehacker’s written a fantastic guide to collecting and embedding album art, which you should definitely read. The short version? Download MediaMonkey, and let it do the work for you.

Granted, once you embed album art into your files, apps like iTunes and Windows Media Player might not display it, and may ask you to search for it from their databases. This is fine: Both programs use proprietary album art storage systems, so just because they can’t see your ID3 tag album art doesn’t mean it’s not there, or that you shouldn’t have embedded it—having it around can’t hurt, and it’s by far the most compatible and rational method for storing album art, as far as other software, most MP3 players and long-term storage go.

Anyway, that’s it! Now you can set your CDs aside comfortably, knowing that you’ve squeezed the purest, most delicious audio files you can out of them. Now:

Listen to Your Music

Because that was the whole point.

If you have more tips and tools to share, please drop them in the comments. Happy ripping, folks!

Lest you judge too quickly, let’s take a look at the Geek Squad’s latest service in their own words:

CD conversion requires care and expertise. We’ll rip your CD collection into MP3, AAC, WAV, WMA, WMA-Lossless, or OGG formats, and return it to you (along with your CDs) on DVDs

Translation: We’ll take whatever is on your disc and put it on another disc.

We pull quality, accurate metadata from multiple sources such as AMG and GD3 and rip your CDs with the finest error correction software. We also hand-groom your digital music collection making searching and organizing your collection a breeze and ready to play as soon as you receive it.

Translation: We have iTunes.

Wondering where we are with your conversion? Simply login on our website and view the status of your order at any time.

Translation: This is going to take a while.

Have a few CDs with peanut butter and jelly on them?

Translation: You are clearly an idiot.

Need an iPod, hard drive, or music server with your CD Ripping? Add it to your cart and we’ll transfer (load) your entire collection to the selected hardware FREE of charge.

Translation: And now that we know you’re an idiot, we would like to steal from you.

I’m sure there’s a market for this—old folks? the chronically lazy? someone’s been paying for this shit for years—but really, you’re paying a dollar for someone to click on a few buttons, and pass it off as something that you can’t do yourself. Or hey, maybe I’m being unfair. Let me know! Just email me your thoughts, and I’ll post them as comments for, let’s say $US0.50 a word? Great. [Consumerist]

Each of the box sets aren’t cheap – you’re looking at $300-$350 for the stereo set or $400 for the mono collection. The Beatles: Rock Band will set you back $90 or so for just the game, making it a very expensive day for the rabid Beatles fan.

So my question to you: Did you pony up the cash for some Beatlemania today? If so, what did you get? And is it worth it?

Technological Detail and Environmental Protection

1. Solar Energy System

The Shanghai Corporate Pavilion features a 1600m2 solar heat-collecting tube on the roof. These solar tube can collect solar energy to produce hot water up to 95°C. Ultra-low temperature power generation techology, a novel way to generate electricity through solar power. The power generated using this technology can be used for both the exposition and for every day.

2. Recycled Plastic materials
Shanghai produces nearly 30 million of waste CDs every year, and only 25% of them are reclaimed and recycled. If these CDs were reclaimed and washed, they could be used to produce polycarbonate granules and manufacture more polycarbonate plastic products. The external facade materials of the Shanghai Corporate Pavilion will use polycarbonate transparent plastic tubes to create its dreamlike appearance. After the Expo, also plastic tubes can be easily recycled to reduce social wastage.

3. Water/mist System

For the Shanghai Corporate pavilion, rainwater will be collected and recycled. After such treatment as sedimentation, filtration and storage, rainwater can be used for daily purposes at the pavilion and for the “mist” in particular. The mist can lower the temperature, purify the air and create a comfortable climate in pavilion. The spray can also be used to form various patterns under ceiling of entrance hall and make the overall appearance of the Shanghai Corporate Pavilion fresh and elegant.

[Arch Daily via Inhabitat via Boing Boing Gadgets]

San Francisco electro artist Moldover, like Beck before him, figured out a way to make physical music purchases superior to digital: embrace the physical. In Moldover’s case, that meant cramming an actual working theremin into the CD case.

Moldover really went all-out with this one. The CD case theremin features a headphone jack as well as a speaker, and the wiring on the theremin itself spells out the artist name, track names, and “album art”, such as it is. He even includes a tiny pocket-sized version of the theremin so you’re never without that odd organic screechy sound. The album costs $US50, which actually seems pretty cheap considering it’s packaged inside a musical instrument. [Denver Westword]

Statement comes in two varieties: The no explanation necessary SSD and the HDD. RipNAS claims the SSD version is the first of its kind.

The silver box is based on Windows Home Server, and is capable of CD ripping (duh), media streaming and networked file storage. Inside, this silver fox boasts a dual-core Atom CPU, 2GB RAM and four USB 2.0 ports. The SSD is 500GB, and the HDD holds 3TB. Pricing info was incognito at press time. [RipNAS via Engadget]

Sheinhardt Wigs GE engineers have announced a breakthrough in the formerly retardedly-expensive field of holographic storage: by making the holograms smaller, they can squeeze 500GB on standard-sized optical discs.

And the even cooler part is that the base tech will be very similar to the laser systems used to read CDs, DVDs and Blu-ray discs today, so the new holographic-enhanced players and drives would still be backwards compatible with previous optical discs.

Still quite a while until this approaches the realm of a product, but it’s good to know about the next stupid format war this will surely spawn well before it happens! [NYTimes]

For full resolution, click here.

It wasn’t until the beginning of the 20th century that mass-produced recordings were available to the average person—the concept of buying music is amazingly new. (Or to some, ooooooold.) Just a century ago, the first records began to do for music what the Gutenberg press did for words. Before them, music was handed crudely from person to person; after, it could reach millions, untouched and unspoiled.

If we couldn’t record music, the Beatles would have never left Liverpool. By the same token the Jonas Brothers would have never left Georgia or Disney World or the Old Testament or wherever the hell they came from. Talk about progress! There may be no accounting for taste, but you can thank these reproducible formats for the very existence of the notion of pop music.

Listening Test: It’s music tech week at Gizmodo.

CDs originally came in long boxes with amazing art. Word went around that they’d go away, since hippies—like Sting—were pissed off about killing trees, but I was sad. Music packaging says a lot about music.

Album art used to be a serious pursuit, as if it was equally important to catch both the eyes and the ears of the music shopper. Perhaps, we don’t need the allure of album art anymore, since we can instantly gratify our need to hear the music we want to buy or steal. But when I was growing up, it was vital.

Vinyl albums – The mama pajama of album art came from the cardboard, paper and sometimes tissue wrapping around and within 33rpm records. A favourite of mine was Prince’s Purple Rain, because the lyrics were printed on the outside for easy sing-along access. (”Ain’t gonna let the elevator break us down, oh no, let’s go!”) More often, lyrics would be found on that easily torn inner sleeve. The best album covers were the ones that opened, with a booklet of photos and lyrics inside. That was the jackpot.

45s, which I actually bought quite a few of in the early to mid 1980s (cuz they were cheap and I was a kid), they usually came in almost no protection at all, just a thin paper wrapper with a hole in the middle to see what was what. The way you could tell the best 45s was, a full-colour photograph covered the whole glossy envelope—and there was no hole.

Memorable records:
• Queen – Flash Gordon Original Soundtrack
• Weird Al Yankovic – In 3D
• Pat Benatar “Love Is a Battlefield” 45

Cassettes – This was a dark time for album art and music packaging. Cassettes were frickin’ ugly, especially those standardized ones released by Columbia Records, with the red block lettering on the side, and like zero information within. Sealed tight with cellophane, we were first introduced to the concept of needing tools to open our own music. (Though the really cool record collectors sliced open the easily torn plastic wrap, to protect the art within, I always thought of that as the equivalent of Granny covering her couch with plastic.)

As cassettes dominated vinyl, labels put more info into the packs, so that you’d get a piece of paper folded 97 times, out into this long thing. That was it for tape evolution, though—a frickin’ long long piece of paper with tiny photos and even tinier lyrics. Folding it back in took origami ninja skill that I didn’t have.

I enjoyed cassette singles (or “cassingles”) because they were cheap, and only had the songs I cared about. Still, they came in a sleeve that was open at both ends, so the damn tape would always fall out.

Memorable cassettes:
• Steve Winwood – Roll With It
• Hall and Oates – H2O
• Prince – “Alphabet Street” cassette single

CDs – They actually started shipping in long rectangular boxes, so they’d take up exactly 50% of the rack space of a vinyl album. I think this was on purpose, so record stores didn’t have to retool their shelving. The upside was lots of surface area for cover art, and the early days of the CD were like a return of album art. These long skinny boxes had huge busts of Jim Morrison, huge prints of the famed Zeppelin explosion that launched a band into stardom. The boxes were also wrapped in easy-to-tear plastic, so getting into your CD, though it took a few steps, was pretty easy.

But then the green freaks got their way, and the cardboard boxes were discontinued. Jewel boxes—and their never-too-popular “eco pac” brethren—just got thicker and thicker booklets, and more and more digital features. Worse, they came increasingly hard to open, to the point where record stores literally started selling specialised tools to open CDs. That’s just wrong, but nothing is more wrong than the mercifully short-lived “dogbone” security wrapper, that scarred your jewel box for life.

Memorable CDs:
• Don Dorsey – Beethoven or Bust
• Paul Simon – Graceland
• Dire Straits – Communique

Digital downloads – And so we reach nothing. Not totally nothing, as it seems like every album still requires a 6-inch square illustration to validate its existence. But there’s no series of photos, long lists of musicians and instruments and lyrics and writing credits. We’re doing with less and less in the way of local information about our recordings—those booklets that told us who played sax on tracks 2, 3 and 7, they’re disappearing. We can use the web to gather specifics when really necessary, but label-controlled artist websites really don’t help. Some bands put out those digital booklets, but not many. And as far as track metadata, the details are scant. And the gratification is so quick, I almost yearn for the days when I needed a special knife to cut into my new CD.

Memorable downloads:
• Jack Johnson – On and On (first time I skipped the CD)
• David Grey – Life in Slow Motion (first “digital booklet”)

I came across this excellent site, the Album Art Exchange, when thinking about this subject. If you want to get a sense of the history and the elaborate nature of album art dating back to the 1960s, I suggest you hop on over.