There has to be an easier way to get music off a CD

[berelinde]

But I am too darned ignorant to know what it is.

 

I've got this great CD of traditional music. The music isn't copyrighted, of course, but the performance is. I'll worry about that once I've figured out how to do it.

 

Copyright law aside, for the moment, I am having a brain-damaged moment, and can not figure out how to get the music from the CD into the computer short of plugging the microphone in and recording off the best stereo in the house (which is pathetic, speaking of both the stereo and the method for doing this).

 

I've tried Audacity with no luck, and have tried to download LAME, but I am fraidy-scared of the instructions. Happens a lot, I'm afraid.

 

Is there an easier way to do this, or do I dredge out the boom box?

[Smoketest]

I used Microsoft's Media Player to rip songs off my CDs and store them on the computer's hard drive. It even has lossless encoding for people like me who don't like throwing data away.

 

I recommend going into Full Mode (via the View menu) to see the Rip button.

[berelinde]

That's what I've done. I've used that program to store the music on the computer, but I'm having trouble figuring out how to translate from MP3 to WAV.

 

Audacity won't do this.

 

After I've got it in WAV format, I'm going to have to do a few simple edits, nothing more than snipping off the first 1.5 minutes of a 4 minute song and fading out at the right time. I have been doing some voice recording, so I already know how to fade out to eliminate the pop from starting or stopping a recording, or from easing out of a song, as the case is here.

 

It's the file conversion that's giving me fits.

[Smoketest]

In Media Player 10 you can select Options from the Rip menu, and one of the formats you can rip to is WAV. You can't convert from one format to the other, but you can create the original format. I suggest re-ripping as WAV, unless someone can chime in with a reliable MP3 > WAV converter. (Why you'd want to go from lossy to lossless format is beyond me though; you're better off ripping to lossless WAV format, do your edits, then converting to lossy MP3 for smaller files.)

[berelinde]

You are, without a doubt, 100% correct.

 

However, the failure was on my part. I was using an old version of Media Player, which did not have that capability

 

Anyway, I'm all upgraded, and am happily editing the song.

 

Thanks for the help, and the patience to explain everything using little words.

 

And I did use lossless WAV. I'm just not the most technologically advanced person out there.