How to Rip CDs to MP3 and Tidy Your Music Tags on Windows

A shelf of CDs is a music library waiting to happen. Copying them to your PC means you can play every album on the TV, shuffle across all of them and let guests pick from your whole collection - without changing discs. The hard part is rarely the copying itself; it is ending up with hundreds of files called "Track 01" with no covers and messy names. This guide shows how to do both with ZenPoint Media Manager, the companion app that comes with Digital Center: copy your CDs to MP3, then fix the names, tags and covers so your library looks good on the big screen. For the bigger picture, see the Media Manager page.

What you need

• A Windows PC with a CD or DVD drive. A USB drive that plugs into a laptop works too.
• Your audio CDs.
• Digital Center installed. ZenPoint Media Manager installs together with it.
• An internet connection the first time, so the CD import can be set up, and later for finding names and covers online.

Step 1: Choose where your music goes

Media Manager uses the same music folders as Digital Center, so what you copy shows up in the Music center by itself. In Digital Center, go to Administration, Music and look at Music folders. If you have no folder yet, add one - for example a Music folder on a drive with plenty of space. A CD copied to MP3 takes up roughly a hundred and fifty megabytes, so a few hundred albums need tens of gigabytes.

Step 2: Open Media Manager and set up CD import

Open ZenPoint Media Manager - from the Media Manager tile in Setup on Digital Center's front page, or from the Windows Start menu - and choose the Music tab. Your songs are in the list.

The first time, CD import needs a small one-time setup. Go to Settings, Music and choose Install CD import. It downloads what is needed - one click, nothing else to set up. You only do this once on each PC.

Step 3: Copy a CD

1. 1

   Insert the disc

   Put the audio CD in the drive.
2. 2

   Open Import from CD

   On the Music tab, press the CD button in the toolbar, Import from CD.
3. 3

   Read the disc

   Press Read disc. Media Manager lists the tracks on the CD with their length. If the disc carries its own track names, you see them here.
4. 4

   Import

   Press Import. The tracks are copied in the background - follow the progress in the Jobs panel at the bottom - and you can insert the next CD as soon as this one is done.

The tracks are saved as MP3 files at 320 kbps, the highest common MP3 quality, so they sound as close to the CD as the format allows and play everywhere. Each disc gets its own folder in your music library.

Step 4: Give the tracks their names

Many CDs do not carry their own track names, so the tracks arrive numbered: Track 01, Track 02 and so on. Media Manager fixes that in one go.

1. 1

   Select the album

   In the list, select all the tracks from the CD you just copied.
2. 2

   Find online

   Under Find online, type the artist and the album, and press Find online.
3. 3

   Pick the album

   Pick the right album in the results and press Use whole album. The album, artist and every track title are filled in, together with the cover.
4. 4

   Save

   Nothing is written to your files until you press Save in the toolbar. Until then, the changes are waiting, and you can check them in the list.

Step 5: Tidy up names and tags

Copied CDs are only part of most libraries. Music bought or collected over the years often has inconsistent names: "the beatles", "THE BEATLES" and "Beatles, The" in the same list, or titles stuffed with extra text in brackets. Media Manager has three tools for that, all on the band above the list, and all working on the songs you have selected.

Filename to tags. When the file names are right but the tags are empty, Filename → tags reads the tags out of the names. You describe the name with a format string, such as %artist% - %title%, and Media Manager fills in the fields for every selected song.

Tags to filename. The other way round: Tags → filename builds tidy file names from the tags. A format string like $num(%track%,2) %title% gives names such as "01 Yesterday".

Clean up metadata. The broom button opens Clean up metadata, which tidies the tags with a set of rules. You choose the fields to clean (title, artist, album, genre) and the rules:

• Remove text in brackets
• Remove special characters
• Trim punctuation from the edges
• Tidy up spacing

Under Capitalisation you can choose Capitalise Each Word, UPPERCASE, lowercase or keep it as it is. The result is previewed live, with a count of how many songs will change, before you press OK. As always, nothing is written until you press Save.

Step 6: Find the gaps and the doubles

Two more tools help you finish the job:

• Show only items missing something narrows the list to the songs that lack something, such as Missing cover, Missing genre or Missing year, so you can work through them.
• Show only duplicates finds the songs that exist more than once - useful when you copy CDs that overlap with music you already have.

The search box understands more than plain words. You can search within one field, such as artist:queen, or exclude a word with a minus.

Step 7: Even out the volume

CDs from different decades are mastered at very different levels, so an old album can sound much quieter than a new one. Media Manager can measure how loud each song sounds, so Digital Center can play everything at an even level.

On the Music tab, select songs and press Measure loudness, or use the toolbar button that measures every song still missing it. The first time, Media Manager offers Install and measure, which downloads a small audio tool once. The measuring runs in the background, and your music files are never changed.

Then, in Digital Center, go to Administration, Sound & playback and turn on Consistent music loudness. Loud songs are turned down to match the rest, so the volume no longer jumps between albums.

Step 8: Play them in the Music center

Open the Music center in Digital Center. New albums show up by themselves, because Digital Center keeps an eye on your music folders. If you changed names with another program and a change does not show, go to Administration, Music and choose Read again from disk.

If an album still has no cover, Find album covers automatically (Administration, Music) looks one up online. Covers you have added yourself are never changed.

From here, your CD collection works like the rest of your library: browse by album, artist or genre, build playlists, let guests queue songs from their phones, or turn the songs into karaoke with Media Manager. See how to make a karaoke version of any song.

Good habits for a big library

• Copy and name one CD at a time. Finding the album online right after the copy is quicker than sorting out a hundred numbered folders later.
• Decide on one naming style before you start, and use the same format string every time.
• Keep a copy. A library you have spent weeks tidying deserves a backup on another drive.

Read more on the Media Manager page, see the Music center, or start with the free 7-day demo.