Be a Better Digital Music User
The digital revolution is happening at a fast pace and nowhere is this more apparent than with the immense rise of digital music. With the growing number of portable music players as well as music player applications, it’s easier than ever to go digital with your music. Yet, is your digital music collection really working for you?
Digital music is changing the way we listen to our music, the way we find our music, and the way we think about music. Nowadays, you can probably take your entire music collection with you wherever you go. But what are you in the mood for really? How do you sort through all those tunes?
The true beauty of going digital is the fact that each song, each album, is data on your computer. In fact, if you treat it like data and create a filing system using personalized keywords (“cheesy love songs”) or special dates (“high school 1986-1990”), you’ll find that your digital music collection will be much more powerful for you to use.
None of this will be time consuming if you take things in a step-by-step manner. I like to use the metaphor of gardening because if you “garden” your digital music collection on a regular basis you find that this collection will be more useful than all those CDs on your shelf.
Importing Songs From CDs
Let’s take one CD from your existing collection and import, or rip, it to the computer. That one CD will form the basis of your new digital music library and how you import your songs can be the key to how you organize later. Windows Media Player is one digital music tool that makes it easy to rip CDs. Just insert the CD in your machine and click the Rip button at the top menu. (Other popular digital media players, such as iTunes from Apple and RealPlayer from Real Networks, will work similarly.) Windows Media Player also has some good preset playlists, called “Auto Playlists.” These include “Favorites—4 or 5 star rated” or “Favorites—Have not heard recently”. These playlists are created automatically as you add new songs to your library. There’s also a clear structure for listing your music by categories like artist name, genre, album, date, your rating of the song, and so on. To make sure you have the categories you want, click the submenu Library Options. If you are too busy for anything else, one thing you must do when you import a CD is rate each song. Your favorites will automatically go into one of your favorites playlists.
