ripping cd's to external hard drive

Hello all

I've tried searching but can't locate a similar thread so sorry if you've seen this before...

I want to rip CD's directly to an external hard drive connected by USB. Each tim e I try it fails the Mac will only allow me to rip to the machine's own hard drive. I've ended up ripping on a PC and then reconnecting the HDD to the MAc and importing into i tunes to play.....this all seems overly complicated. I did ask at my local store and they said the HDD needs to have a copy of i tunes on it first and to do that drag it from the dock onto the HDD, I tried this and all that happened was that i tunes was removed from the dock.

Any suggestions?

regards
Chilts

Chilts said:

Hello all

I've tried searching but can't locate a similar thread so sorry if you've seen this before...

I want to rip CD's directly to an external hard drive connected by USB. Each tim e I try it fails the Mac will only allow me to rip to the machine's own hard drive. I've ended up ripping on a PC and then reconnecting the HDD to the MAc and importing into i tunes to play.....this all seems overly complicated. I did ask at my local store and they said the HDD needs to have a copy of i tunes on it first and to do that drag it from the dock onto the HDD, I tried this and all that happened was that i tunes was removed from the dock.

Click to expand...

Just use X Lossless Decoder. It's one of the best, if not THE best of its class.
X Lossless Decoder: Lossless audio decoder for Mac OS X

thanks for the advice. sadly that has not helped I installed Lossless Audio Decoder and tried but get a message that says the Ext HDD is not writable. It writes OK from my PC but I want to leave it connected to the mac and rip direct via that. Anyone else with any ideas please?

How is that external HDD formatted? Sounds like it's NTFS, which means yes, the drive can't be written to by any OS X app. Not without a 3rd party driver.

OK thanks, sadly I don't know how to tell how it's formatted....can you help?

Open Disk Utility. Select the partition on the drive. Down at the bottom, it will tell you.

I think you've nailed it! It's format is NTFS, can it be reformatted? If problematic I'm not against buying another HDD I can still use this one elsewhere...the only question would be transferring the music and photos on it to the new disk.
rgds
Mark

This article might be helpful. Check out the Anyone Got An Eraser section ATPM 17.05 - How To: Using the Free Disk Utility on Your Mac. If there is anything you want to keep on the drive copy that to another drive first. Formatting the drive will erase everything on it.

great, thanks for the pointer.....but would I be able to hook up a new Mac formatted HDD and then copy the original HDD contents straight to it if both were connected to the Mac?

That should work fine. The Mac should have no trouble reading the NTFS drive.

thanks again. It plays music on it so clearly can read from it, I just can't write to it, I'll buy another HDD and copy stuff over. Many thanks to you and lifeisabeach for your knowledge.

Chilts

You don't have to buy a Mac-formatted drive. You can simply reformat the existing one, though you'll need to first backup anything on it. Also be aware that, if you are sharing that drive with a PC, Windows cannot read or write to Mac-formatted drives without 3rd party drivers.

You're welcome

There is a Terminal command that enables writing to NTFS drives and there is also some third party software for this as well if a new hard drive isn't in the budget. I'll have to leave discussion of those options to others.