This
video is about ripping an Audio CD, and saving your tracks as digital files on
your hard drive in MP3, WAV, or WMA format. But first the question arises that,
why we just can’t copy and paste Audio CD directly to Hard Drives?
A music CD differs from your hard
drive or other removable drives in the way of storing information. Hard Drives
and other media stores files concentric rings, which are called tracks.
Whereas, Music CD stores data in raw digital format, rather than a collection
of files. Audio CDs store data in continuous spiral starting from inside the CD
to the end edge of the CD.
If you open an Audio CD using File
Explorer, you see different audio files according to audio tracks, with CDA
extension. But actually there are no files at all. The CDA files that you see,
are created by the Windows CD driver. These files are simply a representation
of the audio tracks location, but those files are not actually on CD.
CDA files are like location pointer of
a specific track in the CD, and contain no musical information. These files are
44 bytes in size and only allow users to run a particular audio track. So, if
you copy these files to your hard drive and play any one of them, then Windows
will search for the audio track to the corresponding location, which is
actually the Audio CD itself, and if there is no audio cd in the drive, then
you will get an error message.
The Audio CD format that you are still
listening today was developed in late 1970s, long before computers, and then
nobody knew that, someday these CDs will also be played on computers.
To store and work with music tracks on
an Audio CD, you first need to convert or rip them into digital files like MP3,
WMA, or WAV formats.
So, let’s begin ripping or converting
an audio CD. Insert your Audio CD into the drive, and use file explorer to
confirm that your CD drives has read the it.
Open Windows Media Player. It is most
likely that, by default, when you open Windows Media Player for the first time,
it opens in Now Playing mode, showing you only the controls in the bottom
center. In first look, it seems like an ordinary audio and video player, but it
can do mush lot then this. Press the ALT key from the keyboard to bring menu
bar, point to View, and then click Library, or alternatively you can press
Control+1 key.
From the left side pane, click on your
CD drive, usually represented with album name, date, time and drive letter. In
the right side pane, you will see all the audio tracks, which are currently
available on your Audio CD. Select the desire tracks that you wish to convert
into digital files. Before you click the Rip CD button, you can configure some
ripping settings like, what file format you want media player to use, and audio
quality of the file? Click the Rip Settings drop down menu. Choose the desire
Format like MP3, and audio quality.
Once you are done with that, click Rip
CD button. Depending on selected track, file format and audio quality, media
player may take time to convert all the CDA files to the selected format. By
default, Media Player stores the ripped audio file to Music subfolder, under
users profile folder, while creating an additional album folder for every
ripped audio cd.
Right-click on the converted file, and
click Properties, to check the file size and type, which actually depends on
the file format and audio quality that you choose while ripping the audio cd.
So, this was all about ripping an
audio cd into digital files using Windows Media Player. If you find this video
useful, then share it with your friends. Don’t forget to hit the like button,
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and have a nice day!
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