Recording from a CD to a Laptop Computer

I tried to record a CD I have with multiple songs on it but only one got recorded. Is there a way to record the whole CD? I was able to do that with another set but not this one.

Is there a setting on the CD player to play one track or multiple?

Did it continue playing multiple tracks, and Audacity not recording?

If the CD player is stuck in playing one track a time, then leave Audacity recording and advance each track on the CD manually.

When done, just nip out and shorten the time between the recorded tracks in Audacity.

Normally we don’t “record” CDs since they are already digital and we can avoid the digital-to-analog-to-digital conversion. It’s also faster than playing & recording.

The files on an Audio CD aren’t regular computer files so it takes a [u]CD Ripper[/u] application. More properly it’s called “digital audio extraction” but everybody calls it “ripping”. Audacity doesn’t rip (or burn) CDs so if you are not editing you won’t need Audacity.

You can rip to a WAV file which contains the same-exact audio underlying audio data or it can be compressed to MP3 (lossy compression) or FLAC (lossless compression ), etc.

I normally use [u]EAC[/u] or [u]CUERipper[/u]. (EAC can be tricky to configure.) Windows Media Player and iTunes can also do it.

  • Most rippers can make individual files and you can usually select which songs you want, or you can get one-big file.

  • EAC and CUERipper (and a couple of others) have a feature called AccurateRip which compare your rip to an online database to tell you if there are any errors.

  • They will also find your CD in an online database (assuming it’s not an obscure CD) and automatically “tag” the files with the Artist/Title/Album information, and usually the album artwork.