The digital record bin

Let me start by saying that I empathize with all of you procrastinators out there. I have no right to be sanctimonious when it comes to organizing music on a computer—I dragged my heels far longer than I should have before I organized my own music collection. When I finally began the process, however, I kicked myself for not starting sooner—it’s really easy. You just insert an audio CD into your computer and, in most cases, the ripping process begins automatically. Windows Media Player will convert the album into Windows Media Audio files and the album will appear in the Player’s library. Simply repeat the process for all of your discs and you’re done.

After you insert a CD into your computer, Windows Media Player will automatically begin ripping it

You can let Windows Media Player set the options for you automatically or you can customize the ripping process in lots of different ways. For example, it's important to me that my music files have a very high quality and I'm not too concerned about using a lot of disk space to store them, so I set the bit rate to best quality.

Windows Media Player has plenty of ripping options that cater to your specific needs

For more information about the options that are available, see Rip music from CD.

The biggest advantage to managing my collection with Windows Media Player is the ease with which I can categorize, search, and browse my music. When your CD collection becomes unwieldy, as mine did, tracking down a single song can be extremely frustrating: Which album is it on? What was the track name again? Wasn’t it by, you know, that guy from the ‘70s with black hair who was in that other band named after a car? It can take forever.

I remember spending nearly an hour once trying to locate an old Elliot Smith CD to find a song called “Needle in the Hay” that I’d heard on a movie soundtrack. I knew I had it somewhere, but I couldn’t find it without a long, methodical search through my CD collection. If I had the same problem today, I’d just type “Needle” in the search field and I’d be able to play the song instantly. Then I could drop it into a playlist with other long-lost songs and crank it on my computer speakers. And if I like that group of songs enough, I can just open the playlist, pull it over to the Burn List pane, and make a CD to play in my car.

Drag and drop your playlists into the Burn List pane Windows Media Player to create custom CDs

The Player also offers a wealth of possible ways to sort your music, from obvious categories such as artist or album to more esoteric groupings such as My Ratings, Auto Ratings, or Year. My Ratings is perhaps my favorite way to sort because it’s based on my own preferences, rather than data that’s automatically added when you rip the album. I can rate each song based on a five-star system, then sort music using my own definition of quality. It makes it very easy to put together excellent mixes if I can choose from a stable of songs that I’ve already awarded five stars.

For more information, see Find items in the Windows Media Player library.

Beyond the convenience of easy access to your collection, managing your music in Windows Media Player allows you to free your music from the constraints of a single storage medium or device—including your own computer. Your computer can become the central component in your home stereo system, but you won’t be chained to it when you want to enjoy your music. You can copy your files to a portable hard drive and carry your entire music library with you wherever you go; that way, you can connect it to another computer anywhere. (In fact, I highly recommend backing up your music on an external hard drive in case the drive on your computer fails.) Of course, there are a wide range of portable music devices can be easily synced with the Player, so you can have access to current favorites when you’re out and about. As mentioned above, you can also burn audio CDs of your favorite albums or playlists. You never need to worry about losing a CD—you can always burn another one.

So grab a stack of CDs off the shelf and start ripping. Once you begin managing your record collection in Windows Media Player, you’ll come to regard your music in a completely different way—not as a bunch of albums, but as a fluid entertainment resource that you can use a variety of ways. It’s your music, start putting it to work for you.