MediaMonkey forum

GeraldB wrote:Guest: You're not alone; I don't get it either. Maybe more accurately I can't grasp it because I don't see any use for it; I don't play CDs on my computer. Congrats to those who do understand it.

I understand it but I have no use for it, as I think is the case with most people. I want to maintain a digital collection of my music; I could care less about cataloging physical CDs.

Which is why I said you don't need as very few people need it for its designed purpose. However on laptops I've extensively used it's alternative use as local copy of networked tracks.

I've gotten a sense of what it is used for (and apparently they are right that I don't need it; based on the replies I've gotten here, I don't even know why on earth it even exists) but I still don't know what the big, fat, hairy heck it IS! Is it a special folder? Just the name of a feature and not an actual thing? A reserved part of the data base? Something else?

It is an alternative way of ripping CD's to your PC. Files in ripped to the Virtual CD will be presented as belonging to the CD and not as files on your PC. This means when you insert the CD again in the future it will recognize the files in the Virtual CD as belonging to that CD (could for example be used to prevent ripping the CD again). There is only a small difference between regular ripping and ripping to the Virtual CD. For most this provides little additional benefit, for some it is an essential feature.

If you decide to rip to the Virtual CD the files are still ripped as normal a normal rip, but treated differently within MediaMonkey itself. You can always remove files from the Virtual CD and add them as normal files on the PC to the Library (like if you ripped them normally in the first place), but you can't add files on the PC into the Virtual CD and have them associated with the original CD.

If you don't understand what it does simply try it out by ripping a CD to the Virtual CD. You'll see what it does and if you look at the Path of the ripped files you'll see the difference.

Guest wrote:I've gotten a sense of what it is used for (and apparently they are right that I don't need it; based on the replies I've gotten here, I don't even know why on earth it even exists) but I still don't know what the big, fat, hairy heck it IS! Is it a special folder? Just the name of a feature and not an actual thing? A reserved part of the data base? Something else?

It's not an actual thing. It's just the name of a feature.

FINALLY! Thank you!

Guest wrote:FINALLY! Thank you!

Except I said it already
http://www.mediamonkey.com/forum/viewto ... 27#p350776

Well I don't understand it especially after reading the help file and finding that the option is not offered under Tools. This strikes me as being the imperative way of ripping CDs.
All I want to do is to rip a cd that doesn't end up on my hard disk as Unknown Unknown Unknown 01Unknown Track01

" {{WebHelpHeader|Ripping Tracks and Cataloguing CDs }}
If you want to rip Tracks from CDs and also catalog your physical CDs, don't take the approach of adding the CDs to the Library and then ripping them as this will result in duplicate entries. The Track will appear once for the CD version of the Track and a second time for the ripped version. To avoid this, use the Virtual CD:

#If you haven't already, configure the Virtual CD via '''Tools''' > '''Options''' > '''Virtual CD & Previews'''.
#Select any Track(s) and click 'Save to Virtual CD', or drag and drop the Track(s) to the Virtual CD."

Insert the CD and by default the tags should be looked up, if it doesn't select the CD drive in the Media Tree and use Tools > Get Album info from Freedb.

Thanks. I didn't realize that it did the work for me. I've spent hours typing in the details of each CD - fool that I am

Lol! Thanks for being so patient, folks. I think many of us would have been happier if we'd never heard of virtual CDs!

Let me help those who have an issue get past some of the wise crackers here. My experience level is about 4 hours using MM but I was simply trying to extract a copy of a small genre to a folder to upload to a device when I accidentally clicked "Save to Virtual CD" because either I could not not find in the new version where the "Save to disk" option was. Luckily I just so happened to catch that the same moment my base program files folder shot up the same amount, 8G larger corresponding to the amount music I had just selected and saved to the Virtual CD. So undoing the "Save to Virtual CD" was something I had to immediately figure out how to reverse because I am severely limited on space on the SSD drive. I came here looking for the answer but these more than bizarre comments are less than helpful.

I first assumed that some type of virtual disk would be added as a CD in explorer but I didn't see one.

Research determined that a brand new folder 8Gig in size was now located at: C:\Users\(YOUR-ID)\AppData\Local\MediaMonkey\VirtualCD where "YOUR-ID" is the name of your sign-in ID for your Windows machine. (Note if you can't find this, you have to set on the display of hidden system folders in the Windows, Control Panel, Folder options in order to find this folder.)

After spending about 30 minutes matching 1 per 1 to ensure the music files in the "VirtualCD" folder were indeed copies and not something that had been removed from my regular music drive, then I simply erased the "VirtualCD" folder and got my space back on the SSD. So I an not sure what that folder was for other than selecting part of a collection and clicking "Save to Virtual CD" saves a folder full of the selected music there.

Hope this helps someone else who accidentally executed it and worries over your small OS SSD drive shooting up in size. In the mean time, I figured out that the "Save to disk" option is found by right clicking on the selected items from the library list.

As I told people number of times. Virtual CD was/is old feature that was developed in 2002 (still do its job), but naming is confusing nowdays.

I personally have 600+ CDs and worked as a DJ so I wanted to know which one I played without carry all the CDs. Additionally there is the famous FAIR USE of copyrighted material. So here is where Virtual CD stands. To be legal, but again have some sort of digital copy of my CDs I save tracks that I want to play into Virtual CD bring the Laptop to Party (without any CDs), play the Music and after party I delete all content from tree Virual CD and get my space back. Meantime we got era of digital download and NAS and networkdrives and Clouds and ... So in these enviroments I use Virtual CD to cache any track that will be not playable after I take my Laptop with me.

Same thing is with Sync where you choose to COPY tracks from your Main library to Some device that is capable of playing it but essentially we all want to have statistict updated on main library (Play count, Rating, ...)

If somene know better explanation please correct me. For me Virtual CD feature of MMW was the one feature that made me forget all other apps and completely switch to MMW back in 2002.