Ripping

Preliminary

There are two ways to rip (import) songs from a CD. It depends on whether you have installed the LAME MP3 Encoder. If you have, you'll want to use that, since it's much simpler. If not, you'll have to use iTunes. Here's a trick, if you're going to use LAME. Run iTunes anyway, and put in your CD. It may get meta info from the CDDB! If it does, it will make the Finder use that info, so kJams will see it too. That way, if freedb doesn't have the meta info, at least you've got the song names and album name (because it gets read from the Finder) but you'll still have to enter the artist name, genre, and year (0 is not a valid year).

Note: Don't use both methods! I highly recommend installing LAME, it makes life much easier, and you will not need iTunes at all. Pick one method from below.

1. Go to Apple->System Preferences->CDs and DVDs
2. Change "When you insert a music CD" so it says "ignore". Alternately make it run kJams. But make sure it does NOT run iTunes.
3. Go to iTunes (not kJams)
4. Go to Preferences->Advanced->Importing
5. Make sure "On CD Insert:" is set to "Show CD".
6. Check "Automatically retrieve CD track names from Internet"
7. Now click OK to dismiss the preferences

Rip using the LAME encoder

1. make sure you've installed the LAME encoder
2. stick in your disc
3. enter all meta info (including the Date, "0" is NOT a legal date)
4. select the tracks you want
5. drag them to the Library

When you rip with LAME, the rip can complete before the encoding. eg: stick in a disc, select all, drag to your library. The rip will proceed at full speed, while the MP3 encoding goes along two at a time in the background. Shortly you will hear the "Boop-doop-blink!" sound, indicating the rip is finished. At this point, you can eject the CD. Note however that depending on the speed of your machine and your compression settings, the encoding may still be going on in the background. Open the Tasks window to see what's going on. If you quit kJams before the encoding is finished, it's a bit risky, because the only full copy of the song is in the cache, it has not yet been converted to MP3 and stored in your library. When you next run kJams, it will notice there are songs in the cache that haven't been converted to MP3 and it will start converting them, which you can see in the Tasks window. Although kJams is smart enough to pick up encoding songs that it didin't finish before the previous quit, it's best to let all the encode tasks finish before quitting.

Rip using iTunes

1. Go to iTunes (not kJams)
2. Go to Preferences->Advanced->Importing
3. Make sure "Import Using:" says "MP3 Encoder". I recommend "High Quality" also.
4. Make sure "Create file names with track number" is is checked.
5. Now click OK to dismiss the preferences
6. Put in your CD+G disc. It should attempt to get the song names from the CDDB. In any case, after your disc shows up, look at the "Song Name", "Artist" and "Album" info. If it's all generic, or does not exist, you must enter the info for each song. Consult help for iTunes if you're confused. Enter all song meta informaion BEFORE importing the songs into iTunes. Make sure the "Artist" info is set to the actual artist for each song, ie: don't use "karaoke" or other generic term for the artist info.
7. Import all songs into iTunes.
8. Eject the disc and re-insert it. (This will force it to show up in the Finder (and the file system) with the Album name and Song names you entered in step 4)
9. Go to kJams
10. In the "Sources" list, on the left, you should see your CD. Make sure it is selected. Now, in the "tracks" list, on the right, select the songs you want to import and choose File->Rip

The same thing said slightly differently: This is what I do when I have a stack of CD's I want to rip:

1. run iTunes
2. run kJams and stick the discs in 1 at a time
3. fill out all meta info (using album names that have the 2 letter abbreviation eg: Sc for SoundChoice, Sf for SunFly, Lg for Legends etc, followed by the number assigned by the studio, eg: Sc2034), artist names (don't use "various", actually fill them out) and of course song names, then submit to CDDB). Meta info for the disc itself is edited by double clicking on the CD icon. Meta info for the tracks may be batch edited. Just select one or more tracks, then "get info" (⌘-I).
4. eject and repeat step 2

when you've meta-info'd all your discs THEN do the ripping

1. stick in disc
2. rip audio in iTunes
3. wait for audio to finish ripping
4. rip graphics in kJams
5. wait for graphics to finish ripping
6. eject and repeat step 1