How to Rip Your CDs to a Real Music Library

What you'll need

An external USB CD/DVD drive — most current Macs don't have a built-in one
Ripping software (a few good options below)
A bit of patience for a large collection — figure a few minutes per disc

Pick your ripping software

All of these read the disc and pull metadata (artist, album, track names) automatically from an online database, so you don't have to type it in by hand. Pick one.

Already on your Mac. Insert the CD, and an Import CD option appears. Simple, and fine for most people.

Free, and the standard choice if you want a bit-perfect lossless rip with error correction against scratches.

Paid, but includes AccurateRip verification, which checks your rip against other people's rips of the same disc to confirm it's byte-for-byte correct.

Choosing a format

This is the one decision that's hard to undo later, since re-ripping means finding the disc again.

Lossless (ALAC or FLAC)

An exact copy of the CD audio, just compressed without losing any data. Takes more space (roughly 300–400MB per album) but means you'll never need to rip the disc again for a better copy. ALAC plays natively in Apple's ecosystem; FLAC is the more universal choice if you use other software too.

AAC 256kbps

Indistinguishable from the original for most people and most listening situations, at a fraction of the file size. The reasonable choice if storage space matters more than having a bit-perfect archival copy.

Get the tags right

A rip without correct metadata is just an unorganized pile of audio files. Whichever tool you use, confirm before you rip that it found the right album — album art, track titles, artist, and release year all come from an online lookup (usually Gracenote or MusicBrainz), and it can occasionally match the wrong pressing or a compilation instead of the studio album. A minute spent checking now saves a library full of mislabeled tracks later.

Now make it a library, not a folder

Once you've got a folder of properly tagged files, point Raza Songs at it. It indexes the tags, leaves the files exactly where they are, and makes the whole collection browsable — by artist, album, genre, language, or release year — from your Mac, iPhone, and iPad at home.