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PC won't copy home recorded audio disk to HD

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holt:
Windows XP Home, .cda music files; pc refuses to copy to HD.

tomos:
Copy from a CD?
That'll have to be ripped, (well there are other ways, but I'll stick with this one).
I dont know what still works on XP, CDBurnerXP I guess, yes, they have a 32bit version:
https://www.cdburnerxp.se/en/download

Audio usually gets ripped to mp3 file format, quality is slightly less, but shouldnt be a problem.

tomos:
Some more info here:
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows8_1-files/how-to-convert-cda-files-back-to-mp3-format/430c1a17-77f2-46ba-a190-4ab45d2f66cf

Shades:
You can also rip those music files in .wav format, which is lossless. This requires a lot more storage space, but you can convert these .wav files to the lossy MP3 format or .flac (lossless) or .ogg (lossless).

The amount of effort you should put into this, heavily depends on the quality of the audio on the CD(s) you want to rip. By that I mean the sound quality, not the content quality. Commercial CDs used to be marked with an indicator that told you how the music was recorded (Analog or Digital), how it was remastered (Analog or Digital) and how it put to the medium you hold in your hand. Those kind of CDs are usually worth the extra effort to rip properly to any of the lossless formats.

However, if you have a CD from unknown origin and looking like it was "produced" from home, chances are it was created from badly sourced music. Ripping that kind of CD will result in poor quality music files, no matter how much effort you put in. In effect you are ripping a song that has been converted from a previously ripped song. In those cases you'd better buy the song the artist again in the music file format you want. The audio quality will be noticeably better and likely less time-consuming.

Ripping a CD, which has a lot of scratches on it, will prove to be a headache. That could make the ripping process really slow and that is still the best case scenario. Most of the time parts of the song will be skipped and you'll end up with music files that you really don't want to listen to. A waste of time and storage space. It is not for nothing that services like Spotify are popular...all the digital "goodness" for the effort it takes to pay their monthly fee.   

mouser:
Another really nice tool for ripping your music cds is Exact Audio Copy, which has worked for me on older CDs that other programs failed on:
http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/

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