How to get free music on your portable MP3 player
Posted: Thursday, November 10, 2005
by Avec Mobile
http://www.avecmobile.com
It's fun to shop at iTunes, Napster, MSN Music, or at another online music shop and download new songs to the computer and into a portable MP3 player. Most music lovers, however, already have a collection of music CDs full of fabulous tunes that are just waiting to be re-discovered and squeezed into the small MP3 player. When you learn to copy your CDs to the computer as MP3 files and download the songs from there to your MP3 player, you can build a digital music library without any extra costs.
Extracting music from CDs is a fast and easy way to build your digital music library. Copying music from CDs leaves you with the original material as a backup in case any unfortunate incident wipes out your digital music collection from the computer. You can also be rest assured that upgrading to a new computer or to a new portable player won't make your digital music library obsolete, because you'll be storing the music in unlocked, universal MP3 format that's recognized by practically all digital music devices and software.
When you want to complement your music collection with downloads from online music shops, remember that their copy-protection schemes allow you to copy purchased songs to a limited number of computers and MP3 players only. In the future, when you upgrade your computer, change hard disks, get a new portable player, or want to listen to the songs through a car stereo, you have to live with the limited number of copies. We'll be using MP3 music format in this guide, because it doesn't have any such limitations.
The following equipment is needed to extract songs from music CDs and for downloading them to your MP3 player:
- An MP3 player: you can have an iPod, Creative Zen or MuVo, iRiver, Archos, Cowon iAudio, or any player that recognizes MP3 music. Practically all digital music players can play MP3 as well as one or two other formats, like AAC, WMA, or Ogg. For advice on individual MP3 player products, check out these product reviews.
- A computer with a CD or DVD drive.
- An MP3 player/recorder software on your computer. This software will be used for copying music from CDs, downloading tunes to the portable player and managing your whole digital music collection. If you are not yet using any music player software on your computer, you may choose to install, for example, one of these free and popular products: iTunes, Musicmatch or Windows Media Player. MusicMatch and Windows Media Player products run on Windows computers only, while iTunes runs on Mac as well. Windows users already have a version of the Media Player on their computers, but we recommend upgrading to version 10 (or version 9 on older computers), because of its improved sync capability with mobile devices.
- Your music CDs. It is possible to convert old vinyl LPs and C-cassette tapes into MP3 music as well, but additional software and equipment is required for this exercise.
Copying music from a CD to a computer
Step one:
Launch the music player/library software on your computer. We'll refer to iTunes 5, Musicmatch 10 and Windows Media Player 10 running on Windows PC in this guide.
Step two:
Let's make sure that the settings for recording and organizing your music library are the way they should be:
- Audio quality: Set the quality to 128 Kbps, or higher if you have sharp ears and plenty of disk space.
- Music format: Choose MP3.
- Location of your music library on the computer: for example, you could create your music library on a dedicated hard disk F: or in a folder C:\Music that you may want to share for your home network.
- File name information: your music library may grow with time, and for future reference, you should save at least the Artist and Song in the file name.
- CD drive: If the music software doesn't find your CD drive, you must specify the drive letter.
iTunes, Musicmatch and Windows Media Player have slightly different menus, but you should be able to find your way through the software, or you can find detailed instructions in the Avec Mobile Guide to MP3 Music Players.
Step three:
Insert a music CD into the disc drive in your computer. Tip: if you happen to have copy-protected music CD and the CD drive won't read it, try inserting the CD into a DVD drive and reading it from there (just make sure that you are not breaking any local regulations before copying it).
Step four:
Now you can begin to record songs from the CD to the computer's hard disk. When the CD was inserted into the disc drive, the music player software already read some information from the CD and tried to match it with an online catalog of song titles (if you had your Internet connection on). Make sure the titles match the songs on the CD, because from now on, they'll be your only reference to the growing music library you manage on your computer and on your portable player. We recommend that you type in the titles if the software couldn't find them for you.
Step five:
You're now finished with the first phase of the project. Open your new music library and check that the new songs are listed in there:
iTunes: click 'Library' on the leftmost column.
Musicmatch: click 'Library' button on the left.
Windows Media Player: click 'Library' tab on the top.
For copying additional CDs, repeat steps from 2 to 4 and keep an eye on your hard disk that it doesn't run out of space.
Instructions for copying the MP3 songs to your portable music player can be found at the Avec Mobile Guide to MP3 Music Players.
i already know how to do this i want to know where i can get free downloads and transfer to my mp3 player and how to get limewire music on my mp3 and if that is possible
i already know how to do this i want to know where i can get free downloads and transfer to my mp3 player and how to get limewire music on my mp3 and if it is possible
Regardless of the source of your MP3 tracks, you can copy them to your portable player or music phone via a memory card, cable, or wirelessly (Bluetooth or Wifi). You might also want to check the book "Cnet Do-It-Yourself Camera and Music Phone Projects" for practical guides for managing your digital music.
I don't want to pay for downloads for my mp3 I can do that at the mall, I want to get FREE downloads for my mp3!!!
NO!! I wanted to know why Limewire was not downloading any songs for my mp3 player. Yeah, if anyone knows how to download song onto your mp3 player please talk to me!!
Itunes is easy to use but it makes me re-pay for my music. I'm going to try this.
thank you wish you luck