Rip or Copy?

"I should have stated I wanted to make a copy of CD's,DVD's and Blu-Rays; but keep the copies on some type of storage and management device, not make more CD's,DVD's. And be able to play off the storage device with excellent quality. I imagine a computer would do this but I thought those fussy about sound would be using something better."

That's how we took it. We knew that you would most likely be storing your ripped music on something like a hard drive.

Go to this website and download and install EAC.

http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/

After that, go to this website for step by step instructions on how to set EAC up to get the best sound quality.

http://www.angelfire.com/magic2/hq-audio/l/eac-setup-all.html

For CD's, at least, that's all you need to do. You can't get any better quality as long as you follow the instructions. The best part is that EAC is free. Give it a try. I think that once you setup and use the software, you'll see the value in it almost immediately.

"02-27-15: Ptss
Thanks again. I have about a 3/4 yr old Lenovo laptop. I'll check the model and details tonight. Isn't iTunes just for apple?"

You can use iTunes for Windows, but unless you really need to for some reason, I wouldn't. iTunes seems to have a mind of its own when it comes to tagging, and it doesn't support some of the very popular codex's like FLAC, for commercial reasons. For the time being, you can download a free program called Foobar2000. It can do everything iTunes can do and more. Jriver is nice. I have that one as well, but you have to pay for it and its really not necessary just yet. Its very easy to switch from one player to the next. Right now, I would be concerned with properly ripping your CD's.

Your laptop is OK for ripping. EAC has a calibration feature for your optical drives. If, for some reason, something is wrong with it and can't get perfect rips, the software will tell you. I use a $25 Asus DVD drive I bought from Tiger Direct. Its works fine for this.