Ableton Forum

WHat is the best way to get tracks from a CD to play in Live? After putting in a cd can i load tracks into live or must they be loaded some other way and converted to wav files? I would like to try to segue a bunch of songs together and crossfade from one to another. Any tips would be great!

live can use mp3's or wave files.

just rip them into mp3s, or wav or aif if you can spare the drive space. from there read up on warping, it takes some practice but once you get it down you can warp anything. it's pretty straightforward to do but you have to put some time in learning it.

there's a thread in the general forum about software that detects keys of songs, another useful tool for what you want to do. I use the program 'mixed in key'.

When you say rip them as mp3's, what do I use to do that? I am on XP and use itunes or windows media to play and rip my cds now.

yes, those will do nicely

I use a program called CDex
http://sourceforge.net/projects/cdexos/

then I download the latest FLAC encoder. It's an open source encoder, so users are always improving on it and it's free.
http://flac.sourceforge.net/
it works like a vst, you download a file, put it in the encoder folder in the CDex folder and select it in the options or preferences, whatever.

Rip a song or album and listen to it once you're done, nothing sucks worse than ripping lots of CDs only to have to do it again. Encoding rate to taste for your disc space.