Yes. You mentioned you have a Mac previously, right? First thing you need to do is rip out all the songs to the computer with the choice of your own folder. After you’re done with extracting the songs from your CD, just copy them to your external hard-drive! That’s the simple way and I do this a lot. It’s better to rip them to a computer first rather than a external because while ripping your external might get disconnected and it will stop extracting them blah blah.
For a Mac computer – I believe you import them from itunes, pretty simple I guess. Keep in mind you’ll have to change the encoder settings in itunes to MP3 because if you do not you will get them as some other format. Go to preferences and choose under the format settings to mp3. General-import settings-import using mp3. When you enter your Cd a dialouge should pop up asking you if you want to import the CD. If it doesn’t pop out then go to the menu item ‘import’ file-import.
I believe you can select the folder you can import to and in your case you should select the external hard-drive folder.
For a normal windows computer – There’s a rip option on the tabs above on the right and that should be fairly easy. Just click the rip tab or select it from the menu. It will start ripping automatically and will show you the progress of each MP3 file it rips.
I never rip my CD albums using a mac, windows media player works wonders for me in ripping, pm me if you need help!