cd

Pop a properly manufactured CD into a CD player, and you'll hear music in a second or two. In more than 30 years of playing CDs I've never once encountered scanning, searching, or error messages; after I press "Play," the music starts. Stick a properly manufactured DVD or Blu-ray in a working player, and you always have to wait a while to start watching the movie -- or it might not play at all. You might have to do a firmware update to play the disc. With DVDs and Blu-rays, there's no such thing as … Read more

Zortam Mp3 Media Studio is an all-in-one program for managing your MP3 collection, editing song tags, searching for and adding lyrics and cover art, and much more. It accesses and edits a lot more information about your MP3s, including ID3v1 and ID3v2 tags. It's freeware, but when you install it, you actually get the Pro version, which is shareware. If you don't buy the Pro version, it reverts to the standard program after a three-day trial period. But some of the Pro features we can live without or already have tools for, such as Normalization, CD Ripper, and … Read more

To burn discs with your PC, you need two things. The first is a CD burner, or (better) a DVD burner, or (better still) a Blu-Ray burner. The second is disc-burning software. For the first, you're probably limited by the burner you already own, and your burner's capabilities will determine what kinds of disc you can burn, how much and what kind of data they can hold, and how long it takes to burn them. But for the second requirement, the burning tool, you have a lot more choices, and a lot of them are free. Active Data … Read more

Update January 10 at 6:10 a.m. PT: Amazon has now introduced its AutoRip service.)

LAS VEGAS -- The compact disc has long been left for dead by most tech-savvy music fans, but Amazon apparently still sees some life left in the format.

Amazon managers are expected to announce soon that CD buyers from now on will automatically receive copies of the same tracks stored in their Amazon cloud, free of charge, multiple sources with knowledge of the plan told CNET. The cloud-stored tunes can then be accessed from Web-enabled devices.

The feature is being referred to internally as &… Read more

Sonos has announced support for music service Murfie, which is a site that enables users to store their physical CD collection offsite and stream or sell the CDs through the cloud.

Users can stream their ripped CDs or, for a dollar, download them in a number of formats including FLAC. Until today, the only way a Murfie user could stream a collection was via a Web browser, but the dedicated Murfie plug-in means you can use your Sonos controller wirelessly around the house.

Murfie works by enabling users to mail their CDs in and rip them and have them stored … Read more

It's one thing to burn a DVD disc and another to create a DVD that anyone can pop into a tray and play. For making DVDs out of your videos, Xilisoft's AVI to DVD Converter is a good place to start. It converts not just AVI files but also MPEG, MPG, M2V, VOB, and DAT to DVD disc, DVD folder, or ISO file. The flexible output options mean you can create DVD disc images that you can store on your hard drive yet play like regular DVDs (with a disc-mounting tool). But AVI to DVD Converter does much … Read more

A ripping good time means fast, accurate, and automatic extraction of your audio CD tracks, and that's just what you'll have with Easy CD-DA Extractor. It combines an Audio CD Ripper, Audio Converter, and Disc Burner in one feature-packed interface. With a variable sampling rate up to 320Kbps, lossless audio codecs, Stereo and Mono modes, M3U Playlists, Explorer context menu integration, and up to 40x ripping, Easy CD-DA Extractor can create high-quality MP3s and other audio files for your portable player or other devices. Its Audio Converter converts between many different file types, too -- one by one … Read more

MagicISO's MagicDisc Virtual CD/DVD-ROM is a free tool that lets you create and use virtual CD and DVD discs that play just like the real thing, only you don't need to open and close the disc tray. You can create up to 15 virtual discs, which you can configure like any real disc: audio CD, DVD, game disc, or rewritable disc. You can create audio programs, save them as ISO images, and play them like an audio CD without having to burn them to disc. The tool offers versatile compression, encryption, and mounting options, too. It supports … Read more