The VideoLAN Forums

I have searched the FAQs and the Forum, and can find no information ( that is comprehensible to a relative novice ) on how to rip the CDA files from my CDs ==> MP3 files that I can play on my computer or MP3 player.

It seems that the easiest way to do something like this would be with Windows Media Player. But I REALLY don't want to download that monster again. Can I rip them using VLC?

Thank you mederi, for the swift reply. However, please note that I am a relative novice in this area, and the post you refer to is quite difficult to understand. However, I went through the procedure outlined twice - first using kodela's approach, which gave me a Test.mp3 of 0 bytes - then using your modifications. I finally got an MP3 with some music, but it contained only 3 of the 10 titles on my CD, and it would require a great deal more work to seperate these into individual sides using Audacity. Then I would still need to try your method again, to see if I could get some more tracks, then...

What I need is a simple method which will transcode each CDA tune on the CD into an individual MP3. It appears that this is not possible. My only alternative therefore is to save all of my audio and video tracks to an external backup ( so Windows Media Player can't render some of them useless, as happened to me last week ) - then temporarily re-install WMP, which has an easy method of transcoding the tunes, and begin the massive process of getting my extensive collection onto the computer.

I have begun this lengthy process already, and hope to finish it in about a week. A lot of this work would be unnecessary if VLC could handle the trancoding, but I guess that's just a pipe dream.

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Professor

Ripping a CD using VLC is not easy. You need to use a batch script to get separated audio files. Kodela has posted one there. You just need to customize it: "D:\\VLC\\Music\\" is a destination path, "G:\" and "G:/" is a CD drive, "C:\Program Files\VideoLAN\VLC\vlc.exe" is a path of VLC. If you are not familiar with batch scripting, then you better use some dedicated CD ripper, for example CDex.

Thank you for your patience with this novice, mederi. I have been working with computers since the early 60's, when I learned to program in FORTRAN, using a huge IBM mainframe with punched cards. As my old thesis adviser once told me, "You are now able to learn anything you want on your own. But remember that nobody can know all there is about anything but a very narrow topic. Learn to rely on others when you don't have time to learn something new."

So I checked out your link to CDex. The page it leads to has nothing but links to the Ask.com toolbar, but I found a link to CDex at http://sourceforge.net/projects/cdexos/. It comes with no help, but it's easy enough to figure it out. So now I'm in business.

Thanks again for pointing me to a solution I can understand.

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Professor