How to change default music ripping settings in Windows Media Player 12

Most of us don’t carry audio CDs anymore, now you save your music into your computer and then you sync them to your portable music player – The process of making a copy of a song and storing it into your computer’s hard drive is called Ripping –. What you might not know is that the default settings in Windows Media Player to rip audio CDs are: File format: WMA (Windows Media Audio, example: songname.wma) and Audio Quality is set to 128 kbps (or kilobits per second), this audio quality is fairly common, (Audio quality or compression quality means how good the audio sounds, the lower the number of kbps the poorer the quality of the audio and smaller file size).

Today we have a lot of devices that enables us to play music files, and the most common  file format supported is MP3. So, instead of using the default setting in Windows Media Player (WMP), you can change them and later, every time you insert a new audio CD in your computer and click Rip, WMP will copy your favorites songs in MP3 audio file format. Here is how is done.

1 ClickStart in the search box “Search programs and files” type windows media player.

2 In the search result under “Programs” title, click on Windows Media Player.

3 WhenWMP starts press the “ALT”key in your keyboard and WMP menu will appear, from here choose the option “Tools” then “Options…” (See image 1) and WMP options window will open. See image 2.

Click image to expand. Image 1.

Click image to expand. Image 2.

4 Click on Rip Music tab(see image 2), look forRip Settings section, here you can see that “Windows Media Audio” is the default file format, click where is it says Windows Media Audio a submenu will appear (see image 2) ( as you can see Microsoft Windows Media player supports many file formats) then choose MP3. You also have the choice of Rip CD automatically this means that every time you insert a new audio CD into your computer WMP will automatically rip it. See image 3.

5 Next Audio Quality this setting will up to you, remember that the bigger the number of kbps the better your music will sound, the catch is that the bigger the number of kbps the bigger the file sizes will be and if you have a lot of audio CDs it will take more hard drive space in your computer, in my opinion 192 kbps or 256 kbps is more than enough. See image 3.

Click image to expand. Image 3.

6 Click Apply and then OK (see image 3), now every time you insert an audio CD into your computer and click Rip your music will be save in the MP3 file format.