Digital Decisions: Taking Your Media Beyond the Home Stereo

Many of our customers have already figured out that one cheap way to get DRM-free MP3 files is to buy them on CD and rip them themselves. Luckily, we offer everyday low prices on many terrific titles to help you stock your portable player. For those of you who haven't yet dabbled in ripping your CDs, we've created this handy ripping guide that takes you through it. It's quite easy, and if you own a portable music player, it's a legal, cost-effective way to fill it up.

Having your music and video in digital form has many benefits, including smaller physical size and portability, easier backup for archival purposes, and use for playback on an iPod, Zune, mobile phone, or other portable media player. If you have a library of CDs, don't despair; it's fairly easy to get all your music into a format that works best for you.

Here's a rundown of the most popular and widespread digital music formats in use today:

1. MP3: This is the most popular format, by far, because it can be played on almost all players, including the Zune and iPod. It's easy and fast to convert CD tracks into this format. MP3 has no copy protection system.

2. AAC: Most of the music sold at the iTunes Store is in the AAC format with FairPlay copy protection, which means it can only be played only on your iPod or authorized computer. iTunes can quickly convert your CDs into the AAC format, but without the copy protection. iPods and many other devices will play unprotected AAC files.

3. WMA: The Zune Store sells WMA files with copy protection that only works on the Zune. Most of the other portable player manufacturers, including Archos, Cowon, Creative, iRiver, Samsung, SanDisk, and Toshiba, have standardized on PlaysForSure, which is a different method of WMA copy protection. These players, including the Zune, will play unprotected WMA files, too.

4. CDDA: This is the uncompressed, high-bandwidth format used to create CDs. Music in this format can be quickly copied from a CD, but it will start to fill up your hard drive just as quickly. That's why people choose MP3, AAC, or WMA to compress their digital music into smaller file sizes that retain most of the original quality of an CDDA file. Like MP3, CDDA has no copy protection.

Although all of these formats will play on your computer, be sure to check that the files you have will work on the specific player you have, or plan on purchasing.

Buying CDs is still a great way to own high-quality music that you can keep safe and secure on your shelf. (Instant backup, as it were, and nearly the best fidelity available.) After you've purchased a CD (say, from the Amazon Music Store), you can quickly and easily "rip" them, or copy them onto your computer, by using software such as Apple's iTunes or Microsoft Windows Media Player.

The process is a cinch: Insert the CD into your computer and click a button. Depending on the speed of your computer, it takes about five minutes to rip a CD. If you have an Internet connection, the album and song names will be automatically inputted when you insert the CD. Choose MP3, WMA, or AAC at a quality setting--often referred to as "bitrate"--that provides the right balance of music quality and file size for you.

Learn how to rip your CDs using iTunes

Learn how to rip your CDs using Windows Media Player 11

If you have a large collection of CDs and don't have time to insert them one at a time and wait while the computer rips them, check out Riptopia, a service that does all the work for you. You send them your CDs in the provided prepaid packaging, they rip them and send your CDs back to you along with all of your music in MP3 format backed up on DVD. When you receive it, just pop the DVD into your computer and you can copy all of it onto your computer (save the DVD for backup, though!).

As with music, there are a variety of video file types, including MPEG-4, WMV, DivX, and XviD. The iPod only plays videos in the MPEG-4 format that is sold on iTunes. Zune plays WMV, MPEG-4, and some Quicktime files. Other portable media players often support more formats; the Creative Zen Vision W, for example, supports WMV, MPEG-4, DivX, and XviD.

Video downloads are an emerging market, so the choices are somewhat more limited. Amazon has recently launched Amazon Unbox, which sells a wide range of video downloads in WMV format. The iTunes store also sells video files in the MPEG-4 format that works with the iPod. As with music files, the videos should all play on your computer but check to make sure that they will work with your specific player.

Using various software, you can convert from one video format to another, rip DVDs, and even get files from your TiVo so that they can be played on portable devices. This is beyond the scope of this guide, but a search for these subjects will get you started.

After you have the songs and video on your computer, you can transfer them onto your portable media player for listening and viewing on the go. Using the software included with your media player or mobile phone, such as iTunes for the iPod or the Zune software for Zune, transferring the files from your computer onto your player is as simple as connecting a cable and choosing which songs and videos you want to transfer.