Audacity Forum

I have just purchased a new USB turntable which was supplied with free Audacity software. The main purpose of my purchase was to transfer recordings from vinyl LP to CD.
I have successfully recorded to hard drive and then to CD but the CD recording is not recognised and all the usual tips such as opening the file and exporting in WAV etc. make no difference.
Can anyone explain in plain English how I can solve this problem?
It seems to me that Audacity makes, what should be a simple task, difficult.

Audacity saves projects in a special format - these projects are made of 2 parts:
1) The Audacity Project file (filename.aup)
2) A data folder (filename_data)

BOTH parts are required for the project to work.
NEITHER of the parts are normal audio files. They can not be played in other media players and can not be used directly to make audio CDs.

To make a normal audio file, such as a WAV file or an mp3, you must Export from Audacity in the format that you require.

To make an Audio CD that will play on standard CD players you need to use WAV files that are in a specific format. They must be "16bit 44100Hz stereo Microsoft PCM WAV" files. This has nothing to do with Audacity - it is a requirement of audio CDs.

When you have Exported your 16bit 44.1kHz WAV file, you must tell your CD writing software to make an audio CD. This is a different format to a data CD.

There is a tutorial here: http://audacityteam.org/wiki/index.php? ... uter_or_CD

Thanks to stevethefiddle for your help.
I have managed to export a wav file .aup.bak and have created a CD but this will only play on my PC. I do not appear to have an option to create an audio CD as suggested.

harleydaniel wrote:I have managed to export a wav file .aup.bak

I'm not quite sure what you mean. "filename.aup.bak" files are automatic backup files created by Audacity. They are basically copies of the "filename.aup" file.

harleydaniel wrote:and have created a CD but this will only play on my PC

It's most likely that you have created a data CD rather than an audio CD.
Audio CDs will play on both your computer and on CD players, but data CDs will only play on computers.

harleydaniel wrote:I do not appear to have an option to create an audio CD as suggested.

Most CD burning software has the ability to make audio CDs. I do not recommend making CDs with Windows Media Player because it is rubbish. On Windows I use "Nero". A good free alternative to Nero is CDBurnerXP http://cdburnerxp.se/