UKH

I'd like to copy my CD collection to something less bulky. It seems that the first step is to convert the tracks to WAV. Can anyone recommend suitable software, please? Other helpful observations also welcome.

Thanks in advance.

Exact Audio Copy. Rip to FLAC, not WAV; still bit perfect, but 40% smaller, and has real metadata support (WAV doesn't).

Or any decent media manager (MusicBee, MediaMonkey, JRiver, Foobar, etc etc). You will need a media manager anyway. MusicBee is excellent, free, and well supported.

Ripping is painful and time consuming. Storage is cheap. Don't rip to a lossy format (MP3, AAC). If you must have lossy versions, keep the lossless FLAC files, and transcode to a parallel directory. Again, any decent media manager will do this. The latest version of EAC will do two compression passes when it rips (one for FLAC, one for MP3). Use the LAME compressor for MP3.

ps. I have assumed you are using Windows.

Music bee is good for finding all your music covers and album covers. 

However it won't integrate with iPods.

Music monkey will however and is ok but I have problems with its layout .  It keeps changing after I set it to my preference.  I am using the free version though.

I've used Windows media player to rip to MP3 in 256kbps - seems to be fine for most uses.

I wouldn't use WAV.

I've still got the CDs, as hard backup!

I started with MM, and used it to transfer stuff to an iPad. I still use it for physical media management, as it provides better support for that than MB (which concentrates on the logical metadata view). I don't have problems with the layout changing, but I'm still running MM4 (free version, too).

If ripping from scratch, EAC will get good artwork and metadata. MB is excellent for metadata tagging, including artwork; much prefer it to MM for that purpose.

I switched to MB as it's a smaller memory footprint than MB, and quicker to start, and handles large libraries with ease; MM struggled on a 1GB Win8.1 tablet.

When I got rid of all my CD's I first ripped them with Windows Media Player at max MP3 bit rate.

Its a time consuming process. You could try another method of going to a Torrent site and downloading the albums that you own at the bit rate that you prefer?

You own the album and its a grey area about making a copy of the CD, so why waste your time ripping and then editing tags, titles and looking for artwork when this can all be done torrenting?

Agree totally with this recommendation. Have a thumbs up

Thank you all for your comments and suggestions. They're much appreciated.

I was recommended dBpoweramp Music Converter.  It’s about £30 .  I’ve not tried it yet so just passing on the recommendation