CDs. Remember those things?
Exploding onto the scene in the 80’s they quickly became the replacement for our vinyl collections and garage sales everywhere were flogging off original 1970’s records for $2 a pop. I mean, who’d ever want records in the face of CDs ever again.
History has a cruel sense of irony.
Anyway, setting aside the heartbreak of the precious gems we sold for the less the price of coffee and are now scrounging through second hand dealers buying them back at 100 times the price, we all ended up buying CDs and in some cases amassed an impressive array of titles that took up less space and, some would argue, sounded better.
But then came along media streaming and it would seem that if you wanted to listen to music on your Mac, iPod or iPhone you were forced to abandon your CD collection for an Apple Music or Spotify account.
Happily this is not the case because, even though iTunes starting as a CD ripping application, most people seem to have forgotten this and just started buying music online. But what if you don’t want to buy music online? What if you want to listen to your own CDs again?
Welcome, to the forgotten art of CD burning.
Now, before you begin… do you still have, or even remember, what a CD burner looks like?
Apple, wisely I think, stopped supplying internal CD drives back in 2012 so many believe you cannot use a CD on a Mac at all. Apple stopped including these devices because, relatively speaking, no one used them anymore and to fix an internal drive was expensive. Then, as now, the solution is an external drive. Apple sell one that looks predictably sexy but any decent CD/DVD drive will work.
Personally I use a LaCie drive that has been around for years and has been a bused for most these thrown into draws and storage boxes.
So, if you don’t have a drive go and buy one from Officeworks.
Now this is sorted and plugged in, insert your music CD and the Music app will launch.
(If for reasons best know to itself the Music app does’t launch, you’ll find it in your Applications folder.)
Either way, this is what you’ll see.
Clicking on Yes will begin the (not exactly fast as lightening) process of ripping the tracks off the CD and onto you hard disk. With luck the track numbers can be reconciled with the online database and you won’t have to enter them manually. But if you do we’ll look at that later.
When all is said and done, you’ll have a list of little green ticks.
If for some reason the tracks weren’t named correctly, simply clicking once on the title will highlight the default name and you can type in the one on the back of the CD case.
Once this all been done, simply eject that CD, insert another and repeat the process.
