Firstly, thanks for this forum.
I have over 500+ titles (50’s jazz and such) that have been saved in MP3 format. I’d like to copy a lot of this saved material to a cd format that my car cd player can read (or any cd player anywhere.) .
I’m using Windows 7 (Vista on my Laptop). I installed Audacity 2.0 from the .exe installer.
As to my username I’m an active jazz bassist in Florida (US)…
Thanks so much for your help
Zip
For compatibility with most standard CD players you need to create an “audio CD” (not a “data CD” or “MP3 CD”).
Also, use CDR disks (write once) rather than CDRW (re-writeable) or DVDs.
Creating CDs requires a “CD burning” program (Audacity is an audio editor, not a CD burning program).
Most (all?) CD burning programs should be able to make standard audio CDs and most will be able to do so directly from the MP3 files.
My favourite free CD burning program for Windows is CDBurnerXP http://cdburnerxp.se/en/home
For future reference, it is generally better to make audio CDs from WAV files (if available) rather than from MP3 files. When the audio was encoded into MP3 format, there will have been some loss of sound quality, which it is best to avoid if possible.
If I am not mistaken, you can import MP3 files into Audacity and then export it out to WAV. I think that that would be the best way to go, extra step but then you will also have a WAV file that you can edit IF you ever wanted to without any more loss of quality
Marty
Yes you can do that, but it’s probably not worth the extra effort.
Decoding MP3s is pretty much the same in any application and there is no significant sound quality loss when decoding MP3s, so if the CD burner program can do that, then you may as well let the CD burning program do it.
The loss of sound quality with MP3 format is during the “encoding” stage - converting to MP3.