HELLO,
MY COPY OF AUDACITY CAME WITH A USB-FREINDLY TURNTABLE…I HAVE BEEN CREATING MP3 FILES FROM MY VINYL RECORDS BUT WAS WONDERING HOW TO IMPORT MUSIC FROM CD INTO AUDACITY…? IM ASSUMING ITS POSSIBLE BUT I JUST CANT SEEM TO WORK IT OUT 
ANY SUGGESTIONS ???
BEST, STICKEMUPNOW
You can’t. You need to use some other piece of software to rip the audio off of the CD. This will give you either wav files or mp3 files which you can then use in Audacity normally.
If you need a suggestion, Exact Audio Copy is free for Windows and works well.
an alternative would be to plug your cd player into the computer (via the headphone output on the cd player to the line in on your computer) hit record in audacity, press play on the cd player and record the song. when the song has finished press stop and hey presto you should have the song that was on cd in audacity.
ive done this for cassette tapes and it works fine so i assume that a cd would be no different. Its probably not “the best” way but it is “a way” and will only take as long as the song takes to play from start to finish and requires no other computer software except audacity and a cd player.
Lot to be said about the analog method, but it tends to fall apart if you have a portable PC. Deskside PCs and Macs both have “Line-In” and you can use this jumper cable trick. Laptop PCs don’t.
If you’re on a PC and not Vista, Total Recorder will allow you to rip CDs or pretty much anything. If you’re on a Mac, WireTap will do it for you. We would automatically know which computer you have if you posted in the Mac or the PC forum.
http://audacityteam.org/forum/index.php
Oh, and because nobody’s brought it up yet, ALL UPPER CASE is considered shouting and it’s a bad form for posting.
Koz
Oh yes they have, albeit on a rather obscure, dimly lit part of these fora…
http://www.audacityteam.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=32&t=2399
It always comes across badly when I bring up these kinds of points directly to fellow posters, so I tend to alert our esteemed moderators.
The other thing I don’t like is threads which begin « Help, I have a problem ».
a) That much is obvious
b) If there was just a tiny bit of description in the title (like « Help, I have a wrongly prioritised audio Codec problem »), then I would know if I had an outside chance of knowing if I could help.
As no-one has mentioned it so far, I would point out there is a detailed guide to doing this on the audacity wiki:
http://www.audacityteam.org/wiki/index.php?title=How_to_import_CDs
Ripping from CD’s is easy on both Macs and Windows using iTunes. Change the import settings to WAV so it doesn’t make copy-protected files that Audacity can’t deal with. You can rip directly to MP3 too, though iTunes MP3 encoder is generally considered not to be the best. I do usually use it though unless I feel really picky. If you import to WAV, then there is no compression, iTunes just makes an exact copy of the data on the CD.