Back up your music CD’s with CDex

December 26, 2007 by Mark O'Neill |

By Mark O’Neill
Contributing Writer, [GAS]

If Santa was really generous this year and gave you a lot of music CD’s, then you’ll probably appreciate this little tool. It’s not new by any means but I’ve just used it to back up my new Eagles CD and I figured it was worth a mention on this esteemed blog.

Whenever I get a new legally-bought music CD (phrasing my words carefully to please the RIAA!), I always make a private backup MP3 copy on the computer. Mainly because I spend 95% of my time at the computer and I find a MP3 copy of my music more convenient. Plus I am nervous of scratching the CD and ruining it. So I make my copy and put the original CD away someplace safe. Making a backup copy is perfectly legal as long as you bought a legal original copy and you don’t ever share the original or the copy with anyone else.

There, I think I’ve covered all my legal bases!

If you’re like me and you like to back up your music albums, the best tool on the market to achieve this is, in my opinion, CDex. It’s very easy to operate, and doesn’t require any advanced knowledge of audio editing. You just insert the CD and press the button for Cdex to start doing its work.

It works very fast and produces very high quality MP3 copies (or WAV copies) of each song. The program is also open-source so if you feel like poking around in the source code to improve it then no-one will hold you back. The program works on all versions of Windows.

The only downside to the tool is that all the songs come out as “audiotrack.mp3″. To edit the ID3 tags so the song titles show up properly on a MP3 player or computer media player, use a freeware Windows shell program such as Audioshell.

Does anyone have any other similar programs that they prefer to back up their music with?

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5 Comments »

Comment by isma

2007-12-26 10:46:55

Myself … I buy a music CD (legal blah blah blah goes here), and then back it up with CD n’Go Suite, which is not so intuitive but does its work. It supports a lot of codecs , FreeDB.org and it can store mp3 filenames and id3 tags as well, which is a weak point in cdex, as you say.

I won’t put any links, maybe you can edit my comment later, or tell people to just google:// it instead.

Heluva blog, congratulations from Uruguay.

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Comment by VelkyMX Subscribed to comments via email

2007-12-26 11:33:11

Why not us Media Player to rip the mp3s? WinLAME is also good (http://winlame.sourceforge.net/)

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Comment by Chris

2007-12-26 12:13:42

You can get it to name the tracks for you using the CDDB menu. I can’t download and install at work, but there should be an option there to search the database and add the names for the tracks.

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Comment by Javier

2007-12-26 17:53:06

To get the name of an album and tracks in Cdex, the only thing to do is select the cdex configuration button, select “Remote CDDB” tab, and put a valid email address in “your e-mail address” field. And that’s all. Next time you insert a cd in your drive, just click the button with the magnifier glass and the name of the album and all the tracks will appear. If you want to tune more the way cdex assign the names to the tracks, you can select the “filenames” tab, and change the way cdex put the names.

Hope this helps. you will never be using another program to solve the id3 problems.

I’ve been using cdex since I remember (2002?), and never find any weak point

Regards.

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Comment by Marc-O

2008-01-03 10:02:13

cdex is actually pretty good. The only lowpoint I find is for compilations (various artist), in which case the program usually labels the CD with artist name “Various Artist” and all the tracks as “Artist Name / Track Name” or something like that. If there is a workaround that problem, I’d sure like to hear it. When I’m to rip a compilation, I end up using iTunes, even if I don’t even use it for playing media (what a memory hog), and use MediaMonkey for playing the tracks. MediaMonkey also has good ripping capabilities, but not in the free version (I’ll probably pay for it soon anyway).

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