But before you follow Miikerman's excellent and detailed step-by-step directions you must first convert, or ‘rip’ (as it’s known by) the CDs to a format the player can read, like mp3. These things are after all called .mp3 players, aren’t they?
Your player cannot read the .cda format that the music is in on the CD’s as is. Luckily, you probably already have software on your computer that will convert the CD’s to the desired format, Window Media Player. WMP is a little quirky at times and there’s a couple of settings you need to change first to avoid these pitfalls.
First, WMP by default rips to .wma format. This format will work on your player, but .mp3 is more universal and trouble-free. So, what you need to do is change the default Rip settings in WMP to .mp3 format. Then you need to decide what bit-rate you want. The bit-rate controls the amount of digital information that is cut out of this ‘lossy’ format. 320kbps is the highest quality, but also results (obviously) in the largest file size. I use 256kbps as a good balance between sound quality and file size. You can go down to 128kbps (or even lower) but the results are going to sound nothing like your CD’s. Yet this is good enough for some people when listening on these portable devices with less than stellar earphones.
There’s a lot of information, advice and opinions both here on the forum and across the web if you want to poke around or search to learn more about this subject. Here are some discussions you may find useful:
But feel free to ask any questions you have; there’s a lot of helpful people here.
