Rip my heart out

Now, assuming you have knocked together a system of similar or better specification, let's turn it into a ripping machine!

Breakout your favourite copy of Windows Vista 32-bit and load it up (Try it with 64-bit, but I cannot guarantee it will work). I'm not going to hold your hand all the way through the Windows install; you should know how to do this already. If not, find someone who does and pay them in tea and biccies to do it for you.

Once Vista is installed, keep it clean and simple by installing only the necessary junk; wireless drivers and anti-virus (disable daily scanning) and make sure you have Windows Media Player 11, too.

First we are going to get WMP11 to rip our music CDs automatically on input. So open up WMP and in library view right click in the bottom left hand section of the window.

Select Tools > Options...

Select the Rip Music tab and change your ripping destination to your big fat hard drive, preferably with a folder called music or something.

Then change the codec to from Windows Media Audio to MP3 and then tick the box that says Rip Automatically.

Crank the encoding rate up to 256Kbps which takes just over 115MB for a CD. This is fine seeing as we have 1000GB to play with. That's about 8900 CDs, Which is over 450 days of continuous music playback.

Click OK and now grab a CD to test it out with. Slam it in and watch it rip away like a beast!

So, the first step of our magical ripping box is over with. Sadly this was the easiest part and the next bit is fiddly to say the least.