copying a CD with 20 tracks into one track.

[pykee35]

I assist with our village closed circuit T.V. channel and I would like to copy a C.D. and put all 20 tracks into one MP3 file. Can I do it with Audacity?

[kozikowski]

If you have a real Audio CD, the first step is to "rip" the CD into sound files. Audio CDs do not have standard sound files. After you do that, you'll need to import all the songs into Audacity. They will arrive one above the other and try to play at once. Copy and Paste song 2 behind song 1. Copy and paste song 3 behind 1 and 2. Etc.

When you finish making one long song out of your list, Solo the first track and then Export As MP3.

Audacity will not Export MP3 without adding the Lame software package.
http://audacityteam.org/download/windows

Koz

[waxcylinder]

Following a steer from another forum elf I recently acquired the free CDex ripping software package - it can do exactly what you want (but the interface is a little opaque and requires some study) - it can make a single audio file from selected sections of a CD (the boundaries start as track boundaries but can be fine-tuned to the second).

But Koz' technique with Audacity will work perfectly well too, I was going to do something similar for classical symphonies until I was shown CDex, personally I would use the Timeshift too to move tracks along the timeline to the right position.

WC

[Robert2]

You could simply play the CD on your PC and record it in Audacity through WASAPI, WM-KS, or whatever device host works on your system and in Audacity. I followed this method to convert all my CDs to FLAC files in Audacity. After that, I copied the FLAC files onto a USB key. If you don’t want the (lossless) FLAC format, you can always use the (lossy) MP3 format. It is just a matter of exporting the tracks to the desired format in Audacity.

HTH.
Cheers,
Robert

[DVDdoug]

EAC can also rip to one WAV or MP3 file. (Installing & configuring LAME for MP3 encoding is a couple of extra steps,)