Mastering your music

The larger the music collection on your hard disk, the more difficult it becomes to manage.

It may even get to the point where you no longer recognise the titles of the albums you’ve stored on an individual CD or DVD. If your audio collection includes hundreds of records, keeping it organised can start to look like a hopeless task.

But help is at hand – we’ve put together a collection of utilities to take care of the work. With our selection of tools, you can manage large numbers of music files with just the press of a button.

Use metadata
Utilities such as The Godfather can bring order to a chaotic collection of audio files. Using these tools enables you to not only find albums on your hard disk, but also – more importantly – label tracks with matching metadata (or tags).

Tags are labels stored in the music file and contain information, for example, about the track’s source album, genre and date. A tag can also contain an album cover image or lyrics – items that can be displayed when a track is played back with audio players such as Winamp or Foobar2000.

The most important requirement for keeping your music archive in order is to make it quick and easy to administer. So, it’s helpful if you have all of your favourite music in one place. Archiving your CD collection on the PC – also known as ripping – offers many advantages; thousands of pieces of music can fit onto DVDs or hard disks, be annotated with tags and have value added with cover artwork images and lyrics. Gradually, you can build up a virtual CD shelf on your PC screen.

For most people, mp3 is synonymous with music downloaded from the internet or copied to a mobile player. Mp3 isn’t the only format though; codecs such as Vorbis (Ogg) or Musepack (Mpc) have learned from the technology and improved on it, offering sound quality that is just as good for the same or smaller file sizes.

To keep your music files sounding as close as possible to the original, the Ape, Flac or Shn codecs are also worth a look. There’s an overview of different compression formats and their space requirements in the section ‘Choosing the right audio format’ below.

From CD to hard drive
Converting audio files is particularly easy using the freeware DBPoweramp. All you have to do is select the music file to be converted, access DBPoweramp from the context menu, choose the target format and the conversion will start.

The Lame mp3 encoder is already integrated and more than 40 others, both well known and lesser known, can be downloaded free as plug-ins. The codecs come as a .exe file; double-clicking installs the codec in the program, and it can then be selected from the context menu.

Another useful tool for copying whole CDs is EAC (Exact Audio Copy). The big advantage over other programs is its Secure mode, which spots and warns of errors in the copying process.

To get started, specify which codec you prefer to use for ripping via the EAC/Compression settings menu, then select the destination and naming method for the music files from the EAC/EAC Settings menu and use EAC/Drive settings to calibrate your CD/DVD drive – there must be an audio CD in the drive during calibration.

Start the copying process by selecting the tracks to be copied in the main window and then choose Actions, Copy selected tracks and Compressed. Among EAC’s useful functions is a normalisation function, which can be used to equalise the volume of selected audio tracks.