Did you know that you can rip a music CD with Windows Media Player?

Many people did not know about this feature in their Windows operating system, due to the fact that the promotion by third-party developers will always refer to a tool where "Theoretically" everything can be solved with a single click on a specific button. But if we have Windows media Player we could also rip the songs contained in a CD-ROM easily.

A few basic aspects are needed to take into account to achieve this objective, something that we will mention in this article in a playful way. Previously, we should comment that the procedure that we will indicate below requires only Windows media Player, a tool that is installed natively and by default in most Microsoft operating systems (practically, from Windows XP onwards).

Configure our Windows media Player

Despite the suggestion we made earlier, there could be a few variations of the procedure that we will mention below, all depending on the version of Windows you use during the process. At this time we have decided to use Windows 8.1 pro, so the procedure could have a strong resemblance to Windows 7 and some difference with Windows XP, the latter due to the lack of support that Microsoft stopped giving for said operating system.

So, once we have started a complete Windows operating system, we must follow the following steps to configure Windows media Player and with it, have the ability to rip all the musical content from a CD-ROM disc:

• Win + R. We will use this keyboard shortcut to call the window that will allow us to run an application; in the space of this window we must write "wmplayer.exe" without the quotes.
• Windows media Player customization. If this is the first time we run this application, a window will appear in which the "custom configuration" option is generally chosen and then the "next" button is clicked.
• Organize Menu. Once Windows media Player has been opened, we must look for the function that says «Organize«; clicking on the small inverted arrow will bring up a few additional options, choosing the one that says "options ...".

With the steps that we have suggested above, a new window will appear immediately, in which there are some tabs and of which right now, we are only interested in the one that says «rip music from CD«.

Each of the options shown on this tab is very important when it comes to copying all the musical content from the CD-ROM disc to our computer. Knowing how to choose some of them well as well as how to configure them correctly will be very helpful so that let's have good quality audio. For example, among the different options shown in this window are:

• Change. If we do not want the extracted songs to be housed in the Music folder Within our library, we could select this button to find a different directory.

• Filename. By clicking on this button we will have the possibility to choose the name that will be generated automatically; for example, it could be based on album name, track number, song title, and a few other options.

• Format. This also becomes a very important part to choose, since here we would be defining if the song is saved in mp3, wav, mwa or any other that we want.

These are the most important options that we could manage within the Windows media Player configuration in order to extract all music content from a CD-ROM disc; There are a few other options that we could choose, which refer to the possibility of protecting the songs, ejecting the disc once the copy is finished, choosing the quality of the files among a few other data. The only thing left to do is enter our CD-ROM disk and select the option that says "Rip CD" that will appear in the toolbar of this audio and video player.