Gardening on the Moon ( GOTM )

Written by Jeff

A little over two years ago we were one of the lucky ones who sold our house on the east coast and moved to the desert southwest where we were one of the unlucky ones to pay nearly full-price for a new house.

In preparing for the move, I had to consider the weight of my dozens of LP records. They were dinosaurs, but I still couldn’t bear leaving all of those memories behind. I didn’t want to pay to transport them either. The solution I finally adopted was to convert the LPs to CD-format. This was a very time-consuming task as it was done in real time. I played the records on a turntable designed to be connected to a computer and used Audacity to record each side. I will spare the readers the gory details of this procedure as it was very labor intensive and it is not the focus of this article.

I packed up my CDs, some with two albums on them, and shipped them to our new home. They were like old friends when they were unpacked; ready for a party! That remedy was fine for a while, but now I wanted to digitize the music so I could move them to any one of a variety of music players. My car radio has a USB port, CD player (which plays MP3s, wavs or wmas) and an auxiliary port for an iPod or other music player. It was just begging for tunes. Using the CD player requires lowering the radio faceplate so this is a little less than convenient, although not too bad.

As a proponent of technology and sometimes resource for family and friends, I wanted to be part of the hip crowd (not if I keep using terms like that) and use an MP3/4 player. I decided to take the plunge and move my songs from all my CDs to the computer.

I purchased a 500 GB hard drive to dedicate to this endeavor. I had a secondary drive for backup purposes. With the new hard drive in place and iTunes installed, I began the process. I started with my many original CDs. They were a snap as the program would go out to the Internet, find the CD name, track title, artist and other information and copy the CD. This worked well and in no time at all my commercial CDs were part of my collection and dutifully filed away. NOTE- I configured iTunes to import CDs in MP3/4 format.

Now came the task of digitizing those CDs made from my LP collection. I tried to locate a program that would mimic the iTunes software and retrieve album/CD data once I entered the name and artist, but apparently there is none. iTunes didn’t want to have anything to do with naming these self-created CDs and would only list the tracks as Track 01, Track 02, etc.

Alas, I was forced to hand-enter all of the data myself once the tunes were moved from the CD to the iTunes collection with their generic “Tack #” name. I first attempted to use Songbird and although most of the reviews claimed that it was very intuitive, it was an enigma to me so I stuck with iTunes. This was definitely laborious, but I was able to uncover several tips and tricks that streamlined the task as much as possible and increased the efficiency with which I was able to move my CDs to iTunes with much of the correct data needed for the digital age.

Following is the procedure I developed and I hope that it will assist others who are caught in the same predicament. While I love the Macintosh, I am now between computers and I used my HP laptop for this project. I look forward to purchasing a new iMac as soon as the next change in architecture is released.

NOTE – Backup the collection at appropriate intervals to preserve the work that has been done up to that point!

IMPORTANT – This tutorial assumes the user knows how to use the basic functions in iTunes. You may have your iTunes software configured in a certain way which presents a slightly different look. For most people, these directions will work fine. If you have questions, feel free to contact me via the comment field for this post and I will try to provide appropriate advice and or feedback. I read every comment.

Let’s begin!

1. Insert your homemade CD and pull down the FILE menu and select Import Folder. Navigate to the CD you just inserted and highlight the CD and, if necessary, click OPEN. The tracks should begin to copy. If there are intervening dialog boxes, answer the questions as needed.

If you see a dialogue box that informs you that the song names could not be found in the database and it asks if you still want to copy the songs, click YES.

2. iTunes will copy the CD. You can monitor the progress if you like. Those that have a green check mark have successfully been copied. The song with the orange electronic waveform is the one being copied. Those without any demarcations have yet to be addressed by the software.






3. When iTunes is finished copying the “tracks”, you will be presented with a listing of all of your music. It may seem as though the tracks have disappeared because they are not visible at this point. This happens because the songs now have the generic name of “Track #” and they are alphabetized and probably out of sight. Enter the word track in the search box and use the pull-down menu to select NAME as the selection criterion




You should see the tracks that were copied and they should have names like Track 01, Track 02, etc.

4. We now want to enter all of the information that pertains to all of the tracks at once. Highlight all tracks for that particular album by clicking and dragging through them. With all of the tracks highlighted (they should be a darker color), select File –> Get Info. The following dialogue box should appear.
   

5. At a minimum, enter the name of the Artist (group or individual performer), the Album name (i.e. Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band) and genre.

6. Add any other information that would be common to all tracks such as Year or Disc Number. Once all the “common” information has been added, click OK.



You will notice that after a few moments, the program will enter the new information for each song as shown in the sample Andy Williams album below (no snickers please!).









7. Return to the search field and enter the name of the album title as it was entered in the Get Info box and then select sort by Album. You should see all of the tracks from the newly copied CD listed. The reason this step is necessary is that it keeps the album tracks together. Once the tracks are renamed, they would disappear from the window if this step is eliminated because the sort criterion was the name “track”.



8. Now that the information applicable for all tracks has been added, we need to enter the individual track information. Highlight the first track and select File–> Get Info.

   

   NOTE – This is different than before because we are only working on ONE track.

   

9. When the window opens, click on the Info tab if it is not the active tab (see picture below). You should see all the information previously entered.






10. Enter the name of the first track so it replaces “Track 01”.

NOTE – After each track title is entered, check the information to make sure it is correct. This will save time as you will not have to go back and re-edit certain fields.

11. Once the information for that particular track has been added, click the Next button at the bottom of the window. NOTE – the Next button can be sensitive and may skip a track. ALWAYS check the track number before adding the information for the next song to make sure the information and track # are synchronized. Making an error by entering the wrong track name can be quite a time-consuming nuisance to correct.

12. Once the NEXT button at the bottom of the window has been clicked, the information for the next track (Track 02, etc.), will be visible. Enter the title of the song in the Name field. Repeat steps 11 and 12 until all track information has been added.



13. When you are at the last track, there will be no NEXT to click since you are at the end. At that point, Click OK. When this step is finished and the dialogue box closes, the order of the tracks may now change because they may be alphabetized. If that happens, click the Track column heading so the tracks re-sort by track number. This will help keep the songs in the proper order.

14. Once all the track names have been entered, conduct one final check of the track names by comparing them carefully against the information you have written down for the CD. If you notice an error, highlight the track and select File –> Get Info and correct any errors. NOTE – At this point, I played a small bit of each track just to make certain the song was appropriately named. Performing this double-check now will prevent a much longer corrective process at a later date.

Repeat this process for as many CDs as you would like to convert. Remember to backup your files once you stop for the day.

Look up the album on the web and find a site with track listings. This can generally be accomplished in multiple search engines by entering the album name followed by the phrase “track list”. Another method that can be used is to enter the artist name followed by the word “discography” which should produce a listing of all the albums. Locate the album that matches the CD. After locating the CD information, begin with step 4 above.

Good luck to those who use this technique and be sure to let me know how this has helped. Also include any hints you might have to streamline this process.

Gardening on the Moon, www.gardeningonthemoon.com, originally published this post