This may happen with CDs you’ve compiled yourself, where the CD doesn’t exist in the commercial world.īy later selecting the tracks in iTunes and choosing “Get Info” from the right-click contextual menu, you can add the metadata that’s missing, including cut and pasting a cover image in if you wish (iTunes sometimes can’t find a cover image).

You can monitor progress on the screen track-by-track. If iTunes doesn’t recognise your CD, it’ll still import it, but you’ll have “Track 1”, “Track 2” etc rather than names of tracks. iTunes will import the CD at typically around 12 times faster than real life, so you’ll have a few minutes to kill until it’s done. iTunes tells you how it’s progressing through your rip. After a few seconds in which iTunes queries its online music database to identify your CD, it appears in your iTunes menu with a list of the tracks, and a dialogue box also appears checking that you’d like to import the CD. Make a note of this folder’s location – we’ll need it shortly. Now, anything you ever rip into or play with iTunes will be copied into the folder shown in “iTunes Media folder” location. In this window, make sure “Keep iTunes Media folder organized” and “Copy files to iTunes Media folder when adding to library” are ticked. The Advanced Settings window.Ĭlick Advanced to open the Advanced Preferences window, where we’ll set this up. The simplest way is to let iTunes take care of all that, unless you have a compelling reason not to. Click “OK” to close the window.īack in the preferences window now, you need to make a decision as to where to rip your music to and how iTunes should organise it.

In the window that then opens (it’s the one in the picture at the very top of this article), set “Stereo Bit Rate” to 320kbps, check that “Use Variable Bit Rate Encoding (VBR) is NOT ticked, leave “Sample Rate” and “Channels” on “Auto”, set Stereo Mode to “Normal”, and untick “Filter Frequencies Below 10 Hz”. Finally, in the “Setting” dropdown, select “Custom”. Leave “Use error correction when reading Audio CDs” unchecked unless you end up having problems ripping. On the Import Settings window that appears, select the input file type to “MP3 Encoder”. It’s next to the “When you insert a CD” drop-down (which should itself be set to “Ask To Import CD”). Open iTunes, go to Preferences > General and check the box “Automatically retrieve CD track names from Internet” is ticked. (You can click any of the screenshots to zoom in). Next, we need to tweak some settings in iTunes. CDs can and do jump and splutter and you don’t want to find out in the middle of a gig that your rip went wrong. Make sure you’ve got enough spare space on your computer’s hard drive for the ripping you wish to do (figure about 1Mb per minute of audio for the format we’re about to recommend). Sort out your CDs and check them for dust or dirt – you want a clean rip, first time. Preparing your CDs and initial settings The General Preferences window.īefore you rip anything, you needs to make sure everything is set up right. We’re going to rip to MP3 at the highest possible quality, which is going to be good enough for most DJs here. So here’s our quick guide to help you to rip your CDs and get the music safely into your computer ready to start DJing with. It’s also important that you understand a few of the things you’re doing along the way. You’ll only do this once, though, and so it’s important that you get all the settings right for success. If you’re a new digital DJ, you probably have lots of music on CD that you’d like to rip to iTunes in order to use in your DJ sets.

The MP3 encoder window: Get these settings right and your newly ripped MP3s will sound great.

Itunes mp3 encoder