Audacity Forum

I've successfully used Audacity to copy music from reel-to-reel tapes, so I know the system works. Now, I want to copy contents of CDs to my hard drive. When I copy the actual files directly from the CD and try to play from the hard drive, no luck. So, now want to play the CD and record the music in Audacity to enable conversion to MP3 or WAV format and later play from one or more devices. So far, I haven't seen how to do this. I tried to set up Audacity to record the music as it's playing from my CD drive. But, haven't found any combination of settings (output and input devices) to facilitate. Any ideas, anyone? Thanks.

The best way to get music from a CD to your computer is the "rip" the CD. "Ripping" is the process of digitally extracting the audio from the CD and if ripped to WAV format will produce very high quality copies. There are several good free CD ripping programs available such as CDex.

Thanks, Steve. After downloading and installing the “rip” software you linked, and trying to work with it, I see it says, “non-activated version.” What does this mean? Also, when beginning to rip, a message appears stating, “Warning! You are using a non-activated version. A VOICE LOGO will be added to output files.” Indeed, when playing back any of the tracks, there are periodic voices saying something about “AVS Media.” This is unsatisfactory! Is there some way to avoid this? Is purchasing the software necessary to overcome this?

It means that you have downloaded the wrong thing.
CDex is open source and free (fully functional).
As with many open source projects the cost of hosting the website and software is met by advertising, which is fine if it is clear what is an advert, but some advertisers abuse the system and make their adverts look like the download link for the free software. I suspect that this is what has happened.
(AVS Media have also caused similar problems for people trying to download Audacity)

The correct download is on this page: http://cdexos.sourceforge.net/?q=download
The download link is a text link that says:

Download for Windows NT series (7, Vista, 2003, XP, 2000, NT) and Windows 9x series (ME, 98, 95)

Ignore the download images to the sides of the main page - they are just adverts.

This tutorial from the 1.3 manual may help you: http://manual.audacityteam.org/man/Burn ... es_to_a_CD

WC