If you work at home, an easy thing to let happen is massive clutterage surrounding the desk. And this includes music CD’s.

If you use your computer CD player to play music once in a while, you might avoid putting them back on their holder stand.

I use RealPlayer for my AUDIO CDS’s, because RealPlayer prompts you when you insert the CD if you’d like to save tracks. When you save the tracks, you never have to use your CD again (and save CD Player wear and tear).

Here’s a good sequence to go by to, little by little, to save your entire collection of CD’s onto your hard disk.

1. Go through the next couple of weeks, (or 6 months if you’re an audio freak, but you’d better have a huge HD), just playing your CD’s on your computer cd player as you naturally desire to do so.

2. Always click Yes for saving to tracks.
( I’m pretty sure that Windows knows whether or not you’ve already saved the tracks for this particular CD, by going over to this folder
C:\Documents and Settings\\My Documents\My Music
and checking if the name of the album isn’t in there already, but I might be mistaken )

3. When you think you have saved the tracks for all your CD’s, and all they’re on your hard drive, you need to create playlists in RealPlayer:

  • Click on the “Music & My Library” tab
  • Under the “Tasks” area, click “New Playlist”
    tasks
  • Name your Playlist by name of Album (or in a format such as Group - Album)
  • On the bottom of this dialog box, click “Make an empty playlist” radio
  • Click yes for “Add them Now?”
  • Click “Browse”:
    browse
  • Navigate to your documents folder to the folder holding that particular album’s *.wav files, and in the Open-File dialog box ( which is really labeled: “Import Files and PLaylists”), just select all the files in the folder and click the Open button on bottom right
  • 4. From then on, any time you want to play a CD, just click on the RealPlayer icon on your tasktray or taskbar, whether that little icon is, click on “My Library” wherever you can can get to it, so that you have this displaying: arrow

    Click on Playlists of course