Most of us have a good chunk of money invested in CDs. But it’s not so much the circular piece of plastic… it’s the music that’s on it. The music is the main reason we shell out thirty-odd dollars to grab the latest and greatest tunes, and the packaging is secondary.

I’m not downplaying the importance of the case, the liner notes or anything else that comes with the CD itself. These all add to the music experience, but the music is THE deal.

Before We Start – What Is Ripping?

When you rip a CD you take each audio track and turn it into a file on your PC. There’s software that does this (I’ll cover this in a later post) that makes the process as easy or hard as you want.

Why would it be hard? The reason is that it’s actually quite difficult to get a perfect rip of any CD. The CDs themselves are mass-produced items, as are CD drives. Read errors are common, and although most errors are captured and corrected within the CD drive, some are missed. If you’re a perfectionist I’ll shortly be writing about a couple of products that you’ll want to know about – Exact Audio Copy (EAC) and dBpoweramp – that are capable of producing perfect rips when set up correctly.

Why would it be easy? There’s many CD ripping products that are so simple to use it’s mad. Just slip in your CD, hit the “rip” button, and in a few minutes you have your files. However, ease of use like this usually means crap quality. I’ve written a a free eBook about one I’ve used for many years that does produce good results – it’s called cDex – and it’s very easy to use.

I rip my files to the MP3 format. I do this because it means they are relatively compact, they can be tagged with all the track information (title, album name, artist, etc) I want, they can be played on just about any portable music player produced, and they give me high quality playback.

Let’s talk about the six reasons to rip your CD collection.

#1 Wear And Tear

When CDs first hit the retail shelves they were touted as being pretty much indestructible. Compared to vinyl records, they are… but experience has proven they aren’t really that tough and its easy to turn a brand new CD into a drinks coaster with a bit of mishandling and bad luck.

When a CD becomes unplayable because of scratches, warping or cracks, you’ve lost the music forever. Your only choice is to go and buy another one, or – if you were smart enough to rip it first – you just fire up your PC and burn a copy. You still have the case and liners, you certainly have the right to play your music because you licensed it already with your first purchase, so as far as I am concerned you have the right to burn another CD for your listening pleasure.

That’s reason #1, and maybe it’s the only reason you need. It’s cheap insurance against the deterioration that any favourite and often-played CD will suffer from over time.

#2 Parties

CDs get damaged big time at parties. They get used as coasters, they get sat on and stepped on, they get scratched, and they get stolen.

Before the party, decide the music you want to play and burn compilation CDs. Then round up all your originals and lock them away. If the copies get damaged or go missing, who cares? A CDR disk only costs a few cents, and it takes only a few minutes to burn a copy. Great insurance.

#3 Cars

The interior of your car is a bad place for CDs. They roll round on the floor when you take a corner, they get scratched when you try to change CDs and drive at the same time, they end up on the floor and get trodden on, and the sun warps them when you leave them on the dashboard.

If you car get stolen or broken in to, you’ll likely lose the lot. And if you have more than a few CDs stolen, your insurance company won’t cover their full replacement value.

Rip your CDs and only take copies in your car. When they become unplayable, throw them out and burn new copies. If your car gets stolen, at least you haven’t lost $3,000 worth of CDs as well.

#4 Travel

This is much the same as for cars. When you travel, you’ll probably throw some music into your luggage to occupy all the lazy hours at airports and bus stations. Now it may come as a surprise… but CD collections (and iPods) don’t last long in a backpacker hostel.

So rip your CDs and only take copies with you. You’ll be glad you did.

#5 Portability

Most of us have multiple devices we use to listen to music. Your PC, your CD player, your iPod, your home theatre system, and so on.

You can’t play a CD on your iPod, so it’s clear that you need to rip your CDs and load up iTunes, or you need to buy the same music again from ITMS. I prefer to rip then upload, as I already have the moral right to listen to my music by virtue of my CD purchase. In Australia I have the legal right as well, as it’s legal to “format shift” in this country.

If your home is set up for it, you can play your ripped music collection, stored on your PC, in other parts of your house. There are network-attached players available that are audio-only, or even audio plus video, that can be integrated into your home theatre system. This is a big topic and I’ll be covering this in a future post. There is some outstanding equipment hitting the retail shelves as I write this in January 2008, and it’s well worth some investigation.

The baseline is that your CD collection needs to be ripped into music file format before you can do any of this stuff. So if you’re thinking about enabling your music (and/ or video) around the house, you need to get ripping now. Ripping isn’t the fastest process on the planet when you aim for perfect quality, so get a head start and start ripping now.

#6 CDs Aren’t Perfect

Retail CDs are mass produced. And like all mass-produced things, quality can be variable.

I’ll try to keep non-technical, so bear with me. Audio CDs and data CDs may look the same but the data is formatted differently on each. For this discussion, the important difference is that audio CDs have less error correction information than data CDs. Both have sectors of 2,352 bytes – all of this is audio data for audio CDs yet only 2,048 bytes of this is data in data CDs. The difference – 304 bytes, or 13% - is error correction data.

Sidenote: there’s still lots of error correction information on an audio CD, but as users we don’t get to ever see it. The point I’m trying to make is that data CDs have an extra level or error correction, and are less susceptible to damage than audio CDs.

What this means is that a damaged audio CD will sound like crap, whereas a similarly-damaged data CD will still work fine. And because none of this error information is accessible to users, we don’t know how close an audio CD is to failure.

I’ve had brand-new CDs that won’t play, even on a top-end Bose. And I’ve had CDs that play fine on the Bose, but won’t play on the piece-of-crap player I have in my car. You’ve probably had the same experience.

When you buy a CD, the first time you play it should be in your PC so you can rip it to hard disk. Then if it deteriorates to the point where it won’t play in your player of choice, you can just burn another copy.

In fact what I do is rip every new CD, then put the original away and only ever play burned copies. That keeps my investment safe from damage.

– oOo –

So there you have six solid reasons to turn your physical CDs into music files. As you know I prefer the MP3 format over all others because it’s the defacto standard worldwide. And being so popular, it’s got the best chance of being playable 50 years from now.

In future posts I want to cover the ripping process in detail, as it’s surprisingly hard to do it right. But when you take your time to set things up you’ll only have to do it the one time for every CD.