The tools I use for my digital music enjoyment.

First of all, I use CDex to rip CDs to MP3 format, at 192kbit/s using the LAME encoder. This is pretty straight-forward and automated, requiring an entire two buttons to be pressed.

After that, MP3gain comes to the rescue. With it I poke around a bit at the gain levels of the tracks, making sure that there’s no clipping and the average sound level is consistant with the rest of my music collection, namely an average album volume of 90dB. Again, this requires a total of two buttons to be pressed. This modification is also completely lossless, since it doesn’t touch the actual encoded data, only volume metadata for individual frames.

Now the album is complete and ready to be integrated into my music collection. I could just move it there manually, but I let it pass through MusicBrainz first. MusicBrainz is a nifty application that checks music files against a large database that not only gets its data from FreeDB, but is also moderated by live human beings. This makes sure that the song data is (usually) correct, since a lot of retards submit incorrect data to FreeDB.

MusicBrainz checks the songs against the database, and is usually correct. I may occasionally have to correct the spelling of a few tracks in the database, but that means the next person with this album won’t have to. Then I save the tracks, meaning that MusicBrainz writes new ID3 tags and moves the files into my music collection, with my preferred format for the file names.

All done. Now I just have to have Winamp (2.91, I don’t like version 3) rescan the music collection and add new stuff to the media library.