MP3 Issues

[j Padraig moore]

I'm wondering if anyone here can enlighten me regarding mp3 players, etc. I recently aquired a new mp3 player, something I've been wanting for some time. Well, my joy has turned to frustration, because of two problems.
1. I have found that when I rip a cd from my collection; original cds, not copies, it will come up as "Unknown Artist" and "unknown tracks". So when I copy these over to the mp3 player, it'll dump all tracks and cds into folder titled "Unknown Albums". Example-when I copied my Loreena McKennitt cds over, only one identified the title of the album and tracks, but the others got dumped into the aforementioned folder. And mixed the tracks together with other, non-Loreena albums.
2. For cds that do identify titles, I am getting an "Invild License" notification and the tracks will not play. What is up with that?

Thanks

[Aaediwen]

As for songs not being identified, you may be pointed to a bad CDDB server. see if you can re-configure your ripping software to freedb, they tend to work pretty well for identifying most stuff. here's the link out of my program:

freedb.freedb.org/~cddb/cddb.cgi

port: 80

As for the invalid license bit, it's probably something slapping some DRM crap on it.

[j Padraig moore]

Thanks Aedwin.
After trying numerous times at home to correct these issues, I tried another way to get my music onto this mp3 player: I took it to the office and used my desktop PC there. And it worked like a charm!
I was starting to suspect that my home PC is just too old and out of date to properly copy and manage the music files, and it seems I was correct.

[SCShamrock]

Depending on the amount of music you have on your home computer, you may want to continue identifying the problem there so you can upload to your mp3 player. If it is an IPod, then use Itunes as your media player and let it identify all the tracks. If not an Ipod, then most players will work fine with Windows Media player when synced up. Either of these players have the ability to find tracks online. However, if something is preventing this, you can always rename the tracks inside the media player. Make sure to rename the artist and album name too.

[subhuman]

Personally I use FreeRip for ripping.
I have yet to find *any* player that also works well as a ripper, which is what it sounds like you're trying to do.
The CDDB server Aaediwen posted above, along with a good ripper, should solve most or all of your problems.

[Aaediwen]

Saying a computer is too old because of mp3 issues is like saying a car is too old because you can't drive it on the Interstate.

Any machine 150 Mhz or faster should be able to create mp3s of any bitrate from any 16 bit mono or stereo source without issue, and have little to no problem decoding what most would consider 'near Cd quality' in real time.

Also, any machine with a working USB port should not have issues transferring data to or from basic USB devices such as mp3 players and USB hard drives. Age simply is no excuse on the hardware side. Your issues are most likely entirely software, which unless you're running Windows 9x or older, should be easy to update and fix via driver updates and perhaps a couple software downloads.

If that's not the case then the player manufacturer needs to learn the hard way about Celtic warfare