The tale of my stepdaughter’s iPod rumbles on. After much hassle we finally got it all working last week. Or so I thought.
I’d tested it by copying files from her large (legal, I’m sure!) MP3 collection onto the iPod using AnaPod. This worked fine. The next step was that she wanted to rip her own CDs an copy those tracks onto the iPod. She said that she was getting an error saying that with the trial version of AnaPod you can only transfer audio files.
So I go up to her PC to investigate. She shows me the files on her PC that she has ripped from a CD. They are all Windows Media Audio files. And as far as I know an iPod can’t play WMA files. So AnaPod doesn’t recognise them as audio files.
This is very frustrating as she has dozens of CDs that she has already ripped. None of which can be used on the iPod. It turns out that she has been ripping the tracks using Windows Media Player. And Windows Media Player defaults to ripping music to WMA files. One further investigation we discover that the vanilla installation of Media Player that she has can’t rip music to MP3 format. You need some kind of plugin. And the only ones I can find are not free software – they’re only $10 but that’s not the point.
I’m astounded that Microsoft’s Media Player doesn’t, by default, rip to the de facto standard for music files. I now need to search for a free software way for her to be able to do that on her Windows 98SE system. I wonder if Winamp will do it.
So, once more, we’re caught in the middle of some kind of battle between Apple and Microsoft where each company seems to be doing what it can to prevent its systems to work with the other company’s systems.
And that pisses me off.
Which suprises you more, that MS are using their installed software base to tout their own standards, or that they’re to tight to pay the small licence fee required for an MPEG1 encoder? Frankly I would expect nothing less on either count.
As for free mp3 encoders for Windows I have little experience. MusicMatch used to suck a lot. CDeX comes recommended from a friend, but I’ve never tried it.
I think it’s time to move away from win98 really. I know that’s not much help, but support for this OS is getting less and less. I tried to install Rails on it last weekend and failed, the installer just doesn’t work.iTunes on Win2K automatically converts WMA files to MP3 for you by the way.
I suspect you’re right about moving away from Win98, but I have several reasons for not doing so. Firstly, I’m not sure if the hardware will support anything more recent. Secondly, I have a fundamental moral objection to paying for an operating system when I know that better stuff is available out there for free. And finally as I understand it (and I could be wrong here) any more recent version of Windows has the new “activation code” stuff in place and I really don’t want to use software that places such draconian restrictions on what I can do with it.I suspect the solution that we’ll end up with is to buy her a new PC (probably a laptop) before she goes away to university in September.
I’ve found Exact Audio Copy to be a good tool for ripping MP3 and Ogg Vorbis from CD in Windows, and it seems to be Win98 compatiable.
Winamp can rip to MP3 but you have to pony up for the ‘Pro’ version. The free version of MusicMatch can also rip to MP3. I think my wife used MusicMatch recently on her Winders box and she told me it was a little slow at ripping and you have to pony up for the paid version for faster ripping speeds.
As Adam Auden said, CDeX is a very good program – I have been using it for years. It’s easy to use, fast, and can rip CDs into a variety of formats (most notably, MP3, WMA, WAV, & OGG). Assuming you want to rip every CD in the same format (I think MP3 is the default), just put the CD in the drive, and hit a button and it’ll get to work.
Have you tried FreeRIP. It’s freeware and does a pretty damn fine job for me :) It can rip to wma, mp3 and (your favourite) Ogg. It can also convert between the formats.
Win2k doesn’t have the activation code stuff. That was introduced with WinXP.
But surely you used the itunes disk that comes with the ipod to simply convert the songs to the required format? I did mine with absolutely no problems – converted all 3000 plus songs in media player straight to itunes and then into the ipod. could not have been simpler!
Nope. The disk that comes with the iPod doesn’t work at all under Windows 98.