Help! Can't Rip CD's (in Lossless format) that are already on computer and in Window Media Player Li (1 Viewer)

I want to rip all of my CD's in a lossless format onto an external hard drive, but Windows Media Player won't let me; when I put the cd into the drive and try to rip it, WMP in effect says, "already in library," even though I'm setting the destination in a different drive. The main reason I got my new 1.5 Tb external hard drive was to do this. I want to make playlists and enjoy the full sound a lossless format would give me on my home theater system.

I know, I could remove all the CD's I want to rip lossless from my library and reinstall them later, but I have around 200 CD's, and that would be a pain in the butt.

I tried to use a different music management program, MediaMonkey, but MediaMonkey has lots of extra stuff that slows down my system, and I even got a really bad trojan when I downloaded it from download.com. So, that's not going to work for me. I want to use WMP.

I'm running Vista Home Version and Windows Media Player 11.

Anyone have any idea how I can do this?

Thanks,

Dave

Not with WMP, unfortunately. Once it's ripped, it's ripped -- unless, as you described, each song is manually removed and than readded. CDex is a lightweight, open source CD ripper. Exact Audio Copy is my ripper of choice; It's less lightweight than CDex, but no so much that it'll drag your system to a crawl. If it takes a long time to rip a song, it's because the drive is having trouble reading the CD. If you're going through the effort of ripping your entire collection again to take advantage of lossless audio quality, it makes sense to ensure that you're not corrupting the songs with skips or read errors. Both are rippers only; once you have the songs in WAV format, you can either convert them to a compressed lossless format like FLAC or let WMP take over from there.

Adam,

Thank you so very much! Exact Audio Copy is the perfect solution for this issue.

If you're going through the effort of ripping your entire collection again to take advantage of lossless audio quality, it makes sense to ensure that you're not corrupting the songs with skips or read errors.

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I agree completey, I've set the controls for the best possible lossless conditions. I don't want to do this more then once!

I knew someone at HTF would be able to help, thanks again!

Dave

Glad I was able to help!