I’m running XP Home. A few years ago I used to play my old LP:s in order to copy them to CD:s. Due to lack of time I forgot all about it but now, when removing overflowing files from my computer, I saw them all again. My question is: How do I copy them to CD:s and even to the folder “My music” on my computer?
You saw what again? You saw your records? You saw Audacity Projects? You saw WAV files? You saw MP3 files?
Sorry, my previouis answer didn’t address the “copy to CD” request. You will need to burn an audio CD using CD burning software. Common ones are Nero (often pre-installed on PCs), Windows Media Player (comes free with Windows but I’m not sure the XP version has CD burn capability) and Roxio (a moderate cost). There are no doubt many others.
Yeah, there’s quite a hole there. If they’re all WAV files, you can burn them to a Data DVD and probably get them all onto one disk (or one and a backup). If your intent is to create new Music CDs, then yes, you’ll have to sit through the Music CD Authoring Process one at a time again.
What happened to the original CDs?
Many of us on the forum maintain multiple backup drives for work like that. The work has to appear on two different “things.” No more and no less. Cloud plus CDs. Hard drive plus Data DVD, etc.
Koz
I haven’t used it yet, but I took possession of a BluRay burner. 25GB on one disk. Three of those will back up my whole laptop. Koz
Only two? When I was working in IT Technical Support the minimum that we recommended to commercial customers was three: “grandfather-father-son”. I have continued with that philosophy with my own personal data storage at home. The live “today” copy, last night’s backup (which is actually updating a “mirror copy” - but not a RAID real-time mirror) and last week’s mirror (again not RAID) of the backup copy taken on Sunday morning. Because the backups are mirrors, the backup time is small: usually under two minutes each night and perhaps 5 minutes each weekend. All drives are external USB drives outboard a powered USB hub.
For the last few years, I’ve been using [u]ImgBurn[/u] (FREE!!!) to burn CDs & DVDs. But as PGA said, there are plenty of choices.
There are two ways to burn a CD, and just about every CD burning application can do it either way. Normally, you make a standard “Audio CD” (AKA “red book”) which will play all audio CD players.
The other way is to make a “data CD”, where you simply copy the WAV (or MP3, etc.) from you hard drive to the CD. You can then play the files on a computer. Some CD players and DVD players can play it, depending on the optional formats the player supports. The advantage to the data method is that you can use compression (i.e MP3) to fit more songs on the disc, and/or you can burn to a DVD or Blu-Ray disc to fit even more songs.
For normal, non-compulsive, non-IT people, two is the limit. Beyond that, one of them will get left out and put your backups out of sync or out of management. There was a study somewhere that beyond two is actually worse for the general population.
Ask your mum if she’s got all three backups in good order. I’ll wait.
Koz
You shouldn’t copy the sounds to the default “My music” because you slow down your system and most important if anything happens to Windows OS while you’re doing it or worse the hard disk says bye bye then you will struggle to recover the files.
I think the best option for a non-tech user is to have at least a 2nd drive where you transfer (copy) your work.
For example the drive where Windows is installed is “C” so after you add another hard drive you should have C, D and E drivers in your system, the D might be the optical drive, but you can still change that so you assign the letters C and D to the hard drives and the E to the optical one.
But the really compuslive IT-trained folk will have a least a third and it will be an off-site backup and often it will be in a fire-safe.
I’m not that compulsive, but I do have a third off-site backup. My son gets a resaonably regular copy of my music files. He thinks he is “borrowing” my music library - actually he is may last-resort off-site backup 
We were working on a draft page for the Manual on backup strategies for the manula a while back - but it seems to have been kicked down the road into the long grass. Let me see if I can find it.
Update: found it - here it is: http://manual.audacityteam.org/man/User:Billw58/Backup_Strategies
WC
We should alert your son! 