Ripping CDs and organizing music in the modern age

Post date: 2025-05-20 08:34:11

After some super frustrating glitches with music I legally purchased on iTunes I'm starting to think about digitizing my CD collection so that I have all of the music I purchased in the good old days on some of the devices I use to listen to music in my current day-to-day (I do still have a working Walk Man but realistically my iPhone is what I use 99% of the time).

Eventually I'd like to move on to digitizing my vinyl records and cassette tapes but I figured I would start with my CDs. I don't have a huge collection, maybe 100ish CDs total.

I have a Samsung DVD writer drive that works just fine with my ThinkPad laptop and I tried downloading Exact Audio Copy (EAC) which has worked well for my initial tests just to make sure the CD drive was working properly.

My big getting started questions at this phase are:

1) Should I rip all the CDs in FLAC format? Would that also work well to store on a smartphone or should I rip to MP3?

2) I set up the test rip to save the tracks to a folder but I'm curious if there's any nice tools for organizing music on a laptop?

3) Are there any nice tools for transferring my ripped music over to my iPhone and listening on that device? I'd prefer staying out of the iTunes ecosystem (or any other systems that use DRM that may mess with my files) for playing music on the phone.

4) Once I figure this out I think I'd like to volunteer to do this for some family members and friends. Is there a service out there that does something similar (could be a nice Xmas gift) or is it way cheaper if I do it myself by hand (knowing that it does take time to copy CDs one at a time)

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