What is the best way to play music CDs on my Android phone?

Hello

I am new digital sound & audio.

I legally own about 20 CDs with music on them. I have a Windows 10 laptop and a CD/DVD player. I would like to play that music on my Android 5.0 smart phone (Samsung Galaxy Note 3 - about 4 years old). What is the best way to do this? Should I use:

A) Windows Media Player and "rip" (whatever that means) the tracks into my Window Media Player's Library? But if so, how would I then get my music into my Android phone?

B) Install the dreaded iTunes? [Personally I hate Apple's ethics, so I reluctant to do this]

C) Install some other free software (e.g. MusicBee??) that hopefully also has an android app that lets you copy your library on your PC and play it on your phone.

Background
I hate installing new stuff on my Windows PC for fear of adware/unwanted programs and because it never EVER uninstalls cleanly. Moreover I have just done a clean/fresh installation of Windows 10 from scratch on my laptop so I don't want to ruin it! I may occasionally wish to play said music on my Windows 10 laptop too.

e.g. I just opened a CD on Windows 10 and there are various ".cda" files visible, but they are all "1KB" in size so I don't know where the real music is. I have got windows to stop hiding protected operating system files, and I have selected "Show hidden file, folders and drives" but I still can't see the actual music data files.

Many thanks

J

You would need to "rip" the audio from the CD. Audio CDs do not store data in a format that Windows can understand directly - ripping means to convert the audio data into regular files. Most ripping software will convert the uncompressed audio files into a compressed format, such as MP3 or FLAC, to save space.

In the end you will have a bunch of files saved somewhere on your hard drive. What you do after that depends on how you want to organize the files. You would still need a music player app on the phone but which one will depend on how your music files are stored.

1. The simplest thing would be to keep them as a bunch of folders/files and manually copy them to your phone storage/SD card via Windows Explorer. Something like PowerAmp (or any other music player) for Android can play the files directly.
2. If space is limited on your phone you can upload them to a cloud service. Apple Music/Google Play are dedicated music services that let you upload music and stream them through their apps. Alternatively, you can upload them to a general cloud storage service (e.g. Dropbox, OneDrive) and use a cloud player (like CloudPlayer) to stream them.
3. If you really want a "library" to be automatically synchronized between your phone and your PC then I'll let others comment since I'm not familiar with this.

I personally ripped and uploaded my 600+ CDs to Google Play.

PolarNettles said:

You would need to "rip" the audio from the CD. Audio CDs do not store data in a format that Windows can understand directly - ripping means to convert the audio data into regular files. Most ripping software will convert the uncompressed audio files into a compressed format, such as MP3 or FLAC, to save space.

In the end you will have a bunch of files saved somewhere on your hard drive. What you do after that depends on how you want to organize the files. You would still need a music player app on the phone but which one will depend on how your music files are stored.

1. The simplest thing would be to keep them as a bunch of folders/files and manually copy them to your phone storage/SD card via Windows Explorer. Something like PowerAmp (or any other music player) for Android can play the files directly.
2. If space is limited on your phone you can upload them to a cloud service. Apple Music/Google Play are dedicated music services that let you upload music and stream them through their apps. Alternatively, you can upload them to a general cloud storage service (e.g. Dropbox, OneDrive) and use a cloud player (like CloudPlayer) to stream them.
3. If you really want a "library" to be automatically synchronized between your phone and your PC then I'll let others comment since I'm not familiar with this.

I personally ripped and uploaded my 600+ CDs to Google Play.

Hi there
just rip the cd's to a computer to flac or whatever format you like -- I've found the original winamp fine as it tags the tracks as well -- otherwise use something like mp3vtag to tag tracks. Have these files on a shareable folder on computer either via NAS or Windows. You don't need any server system to play these files on phone.

Then use any client on Windows android phone to connect and play -- good choices here are VLC, KODI, Samba player.

Of course you could also locally copy music to sd card in the phone if you have facility for another storage card or store to phone main memory --use same client software to play from local directory on phone instead of network.

Now also on phone as the DAC's are usually quite good you can also set the phone to play through a blu tooth or wifi (infinitely better quality than blu tooth if you like good uncompressed music like flac) connector to speakers / external quality amplifier etc etc.

Cheers
jimbo