Copy Music from CDs for Videos & Slideshows C 528 / 1 Easily Create Music to Use in Your Personal Video Projects Digital cameras make it easy to take pictures and movie clips, and programs like Windows Movie Maker, Windows DVD Maker and Google s Picasa allow you to turn them into videos and animated slideshows. The one stumbling block is background music: although all these programs let you bring your creation to life with music, where does that music come from? Simple just copy your favourite tracks from audio CDs by following the steps in this article! By Don Levison XP Users: Check Your Version of Windows Media Player!... Step-by-step: Copying Music from a CD... Where to Find Your Music on Your PC... How to Play the Music Stored on Your Computer This article shows you how to: Windows All C 528 / 2 C 528 / 5 C 528 / 11 C 528 / 13... Upgrade to the latest version of Windows Media Player if you use Windows XP... Copy music from audio CDs to your PC... Find and play the music stored on your computer 17
C 528 / 2 Copy Music from CDs for Videos & Slideshows We use Windows Media Player to copy music from CDs Windows 7/Vista users have the latest version but Windows XP users may need to upgrade XP Users: Check Your Version of Windows Media Player! The program we re going to be using to copy music from CDs is Windows Media Player. It s included in every version of Windows, and you may well have encountered it on your travels: when you play an audio or video file, an audio CD or a DVD movie, it s usually Windows Media Player that steps in to handle the job. Over the years there have been numerous versions of Windows Media Player, and before we start I want to make sure you re using a suitable version. If you re using Windows 7 or Vista, that s easy: Windows 7 users have version 12 (which is the very latest version), and Windows Vista users have version 11 (which is the version built into Vista, and Microsoft won t allow Vista users to upgrade to version 12 for some reason). If you re using Windows XP, however, things are not as certain. You may have version 11, but you may still be stuck in the past with the rather-elderly version 10 or the even-older version 9! So, if you re a Windows XP user, work your way through the steps below to determine which version you have and if necessary upgrade your old version to the newer version. (Don t worry, the upgrade is completely free and only takes a few minutes.) 1. Start Windows Media Player by going to Start > All Programs > Accessories > Entertainment > Windows Media Player. (If you don t see Windows Media Player in that Entertainment section, have a look in the main All Programs section for it: you ll probably find it there instead, and you ll probably discover in a moment that you do already have the up-todate version 11.) 18
Copy Music from CDs for Videos & Slideshows C 528 / 3 2. When the program has started, open the Help menu at the top of the window and choose About Windows Media Player. 3. A little dialog similar to the one pictured in the following screenshot will appear. Alongside Version you ll see the version of Windows Media Player you have. It s quite a long collection of numbers, but only the first matters: if it s an 11, you re up-to-date, so click OK, close Windows Media Player and ignore the remaining steps. Check which version you currently have If the version number doesnʼt start with 11, you need to upgrade 4. If your version starts with a 9 or a 10, you re using an old version and you need to upgrade by following the remaining steps. First, click OK to close this little dialog, and then close Windows Media Player itself. 5. Now start your web browser (such as Internet Explorer), type the following URL into its address box at the top and press Enter: www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/ player/11/default.aspx 6. When you arrive at the web page, you ll see a large picture at the top containing a blue Download Now button. Click Download Now. 19
C 528 / 4 Copy Music from CDs for Videos & Slideshows 7. You ll be whisked to another, simpler-looking page, with another Download Now button below the text. Click that button. 8. In the little dialog that appears, offering you a choice between Run and Save, click Run. 9. Wait a minute or two while the program is downloaded, and another little dialog will ask whether you want to run this software. Click Run. 10. Now you ll see a window like the one pictured below, which walks you through the mostlyautomatic process of installing Windows Media Player. Click the Validate button at the bottom. Click Validate 11. In the next step, click I Accept. 12. Now just sit tight for a few minutes while the new version of Windows Media Player is installed. You ll see a pair of progress bars in the window to give you some idea of how the job is progressing. 20
Copy Music from CDs for Videos & Slideshows C 528 / 5 13. Once the task is complete you ll see the window pictured in the next screenshot. Click Express Settings (Recommended) to select it and then click Finish. Select Express Settings (Recommended) Click Finish 14. After a brief pause, your new version of Windows Media Player will open, and you ve finished. However, since we don t actually need Windows Media Player to be running at the moment, close it by clicking the x button in its top right corner. Step-by-step: Copying Music from a CD The process of copying music from an audio CD is known as ripping in the world of computing, so you ll see the words rip and ripping in Windows Media Player, rather than copy and copying. Perhaps that serves to make it sound more technical something computing folk love to do! but it s actually quite straightforward. When you want to copy the music from an audio CD to your PC, just follow these steps: 21
C 528 / 6 Copy Music from CDs for Videos & Slideshows 1. Insert your CD into your computer s CD drive and close the drive tray. 2. After a few seconds, when Windows has had a chance to examine the CD, you may see a little dialog like the one pictured in the next screenshot. If you do, have a look at the options it presents: the one you want, if it appears there, is Rip music from CD using Windows Media Player. 3. If that option does appear in the list, click it and jump to step 6 below. If that option doesn t appear (or if this little dialog doesn t open on your screen), don t worry I ll show you a different way to get started in steps 4 and 5 below. For now, just close that little dialog (if it appeared) by clicking the x button in its top right corner. Click this option if you see it in the list How to start Windows Media Player yourself 4. If that little dialog didn t appear on your computer (or it didn t contain the Rip music from CD using Windows Media Player option), start Windows Media Player yourself by going to Start > All Programs > Windows Media Player. 22
Copy Music from CDs for Videos & Slideshows C 528 / 7 5. When the Windows Media Player window appears, do the following according to the version you re using: Version 12 (Windows 7): in the panel at the left of the window, click the name of the CD you ve just inserted (which will have a little CD icon beside it), as indicated in the next screenshot. In version 12, click the name of your audio CD Version 11 (Windows Vista/XP): on the black bar near the top of the window, click the Rip button. In version 11, click on Rip 6. Now, whichever version of Windows Media Player you re using, you ll be looking at much the same thing: the main part of the window shows details of your CD (the album name, artist name, and year, with a picture of the cover) and a list of the tracks it contains. 23
C 528 / 8 Copy Music from CDs for Videos & Slideshows Windows Media Player uses your Internet connection to find details of the CD you ve inserted: the CD contains an identification number and Windows Media Player looks up that number in an online database to find all the names, titles and pictures it displays. If you weren t connected to the Internet when Windows Media Player started, you could connect now, right-click the space where the album cover should appear and choose Update album info to ask Windows Media Player to try to fill in the missing information. Alternatively, you can enter the track names by hand as described below. Make sure the names of the tracks are correct 7. If Windows Media Player didn t manage to identify your CD and fill in the details (which is possible for some rare CDs), it s a good idea to fill in the name of each track yourself. This way, when the copying process is complete, you ll end up with audio files that have recognisable song names rather than anonymous names like Track 1, Track 2 and so on. (In some cases, mistakes in that online database can also mean that track names are wrong, and it s wise to correct those before continuing.) To rename a track, click it, press the F2 key on your keyboard, and then type the correct name, pressing Enter to confirm it. Click a track name and press F2 to type a different name 8. The next thing to do is to decide which tracks you want to copy from this CD. To the left of each track you ll see a checkbox which is currently ticked. As you can probably guess, if 24
Copy Music from CDs for Videos & Slideshows C 528 / 9 there are any tracks you don t want to copy, you simply click the appropriate checkboxes to remove the ticks from them. Remove the ticks from tracks you donʼt want to copy 9. Now you re ready to start copying the music from the CD to your computer, which is a neat, automatic process. To start it, do the following according to the version you re using: Version 12 (Windows 7): on the light-blue bar above the CD details, click Rip CD. In version 12, click this button Version 11 (Windows Vista/XP): near the bottom corner of the window, click the Start Rip button. In version 11, click this button 25
C 528 / 10 Copy Music from CDs for Videos & Slideshows 10. If this is the first time you ve copied tracks from an audio CD, there s one little interruption you ll be faced with before the process starts. You ll see the dialog pictured in the next screenshot which offers to protect the music you copy, limiting where and how the audio files can be used. You need to refuse this option of copy protection, so select the option labelled Do not add copy protection to your music, then tick the checkbox below this option, and finally click OK. Select this option Tick this box Click OK 26 Windows Media Player copies the audio tracks to your PC 11. Now the copying process begins and you can sit and watch (or go and do something more entertaining!) while Windows Media Player takes care of it. The tracks you ticked are copied to your PC one-by-one, and you ll see a little progress bar beside the track currently being copied, letting you see how the process is going. Tracks that are waiting to be copied have the word Pending beside them, and those that have already been copied have the words Ripped to library.
Copy Music from CDs for Videos & Slideshows C 528 / 11 12. Once all the tracks have been copied (and each has the words Ripped to library beside it), the job is done. You can eject the CD from the drive and either close Windows Media Player or insert another CD to copy in the same way. Where to Find Your Music on Your PC I m sure you re aware that Windows creates special folders for you in which you can keep all your own files: there s a folder named Documents or My Documents, and another named Pictures or My Pictures. Besides these two, which you probably use quite frequently, there s another named Music or My Music which as its name suggests is where Windows assumes you ll want to store your music files. Quite sensibly, this is the folder in which Windows Media Player saves the files it copies from audio CDs. It organises these files in a logical way as well: when you copy music from a CD, it creates a folder named after the CD s artist, and inside that, it creates another folder named after the CD s title. Inside that folder you ll find the audio files copied from that CD, one for each track, named after the song title. Whenever you want to see the music stored on your PC, open the Start menu and click Music (or My Music) on the panel at the right. When the folder opens, double-click the name of the artist you re interested in Windows Media Player keeps your music collection organised 27
C 528 / 12 Copy Music from CDs for Videos & Slideshows Open the artistʼs folder then double-click the name of an album Then open the albumʼs folder and you ll see all the audio files that you ve copied from that album: Each track from the album is saved as a separate audio file Exactly the same applies if you re adding background music to a video or slideshow project in one of the programs I mentioned in the introduction to this article. After you click an option to add music to the project, you ll see a file dialog that prompts you to select the audio file to use. In 28
Copy Music from CDs for Videos & Slideshows C 528 / 13 the same way, navigate to your Music (or My Music ) folder, double-click the required artist, then the required album, and finally double-click the track you want to use. How to Play the Music Stored on Your Computer Aside from including background music in your video and slideshow projects, the other obvious use for the music stored on your PC is to listen to it while you work. One way to do that is to make your way to the folder containing the music you want to play (as described in the previous topic) and then double-click one of your audio files. Using this method, Windows Media Player will open and play the file you double-clicked. However, it won t play the whole album: when that track finishes, it will stop. You could then double-click another track to play, but this isn t the ideal way of doing things. A better approach is to begin by starting Windows Media Player. When its window appears, do the following: Version 12 (Windows 7): in the panel at the left of the window click Album. Version 11 (Windows Vista/XP): on the black bar near the top of the window click Library, and then click Album in the panel at the left of the window. When you do this, you ll see one of the useful features of Windows Media Player: it keeps track of the music in your Music (or My Music ) folder and presents it all to you as a library, with a straightforward alphabetical listing of all your albums. Play individual files by doubleclicking them Use Windows Media Player to play an entire album 29
C 528 / 14 Copy Music from CDs for Videos & Slideshows To play an album, just right-click it and choose Play from the menu that appears. Windows Media Player will then play the entire album (excluding the tracks you chose not to copy to your PC, of course!) from start to finish. You can use the controls at the bottom of the window to adjust the volume, skip to the next or previous track, and pause, resume or stop playback. Right-click an album Choose Play 30