Books on CD ripping…

It’s been a while, but if you want to backup an audiobook that is on a CD, you don’t have to record it in full 44KHz glory, instead, you can use reduced settings. Here’s a guide for doing it with iTunes….

# Choose iTune/Preferences on the Mac (on the PC, it is Edit/Options I think)
# Goto the advanced tab and select MP3, Custom… and pick 64Kbps, mono and 24KHz (this actually gives you 32Kbps mono as the dialog is a little strange), make sure you do *not* select VBR as at these low levels, variable bit rate actually increases file sizes.
# You should get about 4 minutes per megabyte with this encoding and it will sound with human voices
# Start up iTunes. Insert your CD iTunes now uses GraceNote to find the CD title
# The CD titles should now come up and ask you to import, say yes and it now converts it to .mp3 files and puts them into your iTunes library
# Now download “mp3merger”:http://www.sofotex.com/Mp3-Merger-download_L43041.html or “mp3 merger”:google
# Load all the various files in and make it one big mp3

BTW if you like the Lame MP3 encoder (the best!) rather than what Apple uses, there is a free utility called “Audion”:http://www.panic.com/audion/ which includes the Lame encoder.