I would like to place all of my 200 music CDs on the 80GB hard drive of my laptop. I’m thinking of converting each CD to a particular folder in 160bps, 44kHz, Stereo (good CD quality) format. I don’t know too much about computers and I hope I’m thinking of doing it right, if not, please guide me step by step how to do it. Thanks, guys.

You wont get them all onto an 80Gb drive. Assuming an average CD of 70 mins you will only get about 130 of them on to that disk. However, if you were to convert them to MP3 then you would with room to spare but that would mean a loss of quality. Stuart

Hello friends.. I don't know very much about music cd's neither, but my nephew was storing his collection of audio cd's onto a Maxtor external hard drive. I guess he wanted to save space on his main desktop pc, so he loaded all his music and audio into that external one. Of course, this is a bit pricey for another hard drive, but it might give you some ideas for the future if your collection should expand. Hope this helps a bit; good luck. ~Tommyo

Have look here: http://www.computing.net/novice/mp3/makeintro.html For a free program to rip music from cd's go here... http://www.mgshareware.com/frmmain.shtml Jegzzy

200 CDs with let's say 15 songs each at 6MB per song would be ~18GB in the MP3 format. CDex does a nice job and adds the ID3 tags from the external data base. CDex is free of course and uses LAME encoding. Bryan

wma format(.wma) seems like a better format than mp3 to me since I started making them for my portable audio player that I use when I jog. It seem like the songs are less size and better quality than mp3s. Not all audio players can play wma but I've had 2 brands and they both played them. You can convert the cds to wma with Windows Media Player already on your computer. I do mine at 96kbps with Nero and I can get a couple of big albums on my 128mb audio player at pret ner cd quality. Can't tell the difference between the cd or the wma.