okay, so I know I’m a dumb, old fogey. But I’m posting ithis question here, 'cause there’s no way I’m gonna ask my teenager and let her know it:
to show how old I am:
25 years ago, I decided to go “modern” and record my vinyl albums onto cassettes. Now, I am using a program called Audiograbber which converts the music on the cassettes into .Wav and .mp3 files. I’m saving the files on CD’s.
I can obviously play these files on my computer,
But how do I convert the cassettes into something I can play on my 1994-vintage CD player?
Audio CDs are in Audio CD format. (AKA The Red Book Standard.) It’s an uncompressed, stereo, 16-bit pulse-code modulated signal sampled at 44.1kHz.
Your CD burning application should have an option to burn the disc as an audio CD, as opposed to a CD-ROM with files on it. Going from cassette to .mp3 to CD will end up sounding like ass, though.
And wouldn’t it make more sense to record the original vinyl to CD? One less generation of loss. And cassettes will lose high frequencies over time.
Of course, if you don’t have the original vinyl anymore…
Here’s another vote for going from vinyl to hard drive to CD, or if you must, tape to hard drive to CD. Don’t convert anything to mp3 first. You want the most fidelity you can get out of your recordings, so stay in 44.1 KHz, 16-bit stereo .wav format. You’ll need to do some editing, too, seeing as how a CD is 10 minutes short of a C-90 side. Does Audiograbber have a functional wave editor?
You need to have your files in WAV format to record them straight onto a CD and make them playable. Some CD burning programs will do this for you automatically and you won’t even know it happened. A few (mostly the older programs), needed you to convert them manually. What sort of CD burning software do you have?
Incorrect. Check friedo’s post for the standard for CDs.
Hopefully this won’t get me in trouble, but it seems to me this is a legitimate use of file-sharing. You bought the music - you own the rights to your own copies. Rather than going to all the work of manually copying the stuff off of old cassettes, I’d just use a file-sharing network, search for the MP3’s, and download them. That’s what I did with my old vinyl collection. The stuff I couldn’t find online I copied the hard way by feeding my turntable into a receiver, and the line outs of my receiver to my audio card. I captured the music as WAV files, then used a CD burning program to assemble the tracks and write them to audio CD. I even scanned the album covers, reduced them, and made my own Jewel Case inserts.
I saw that before I posted. While that may be the standard format, apparently WAVs are compatible with stereos. I used a program that copied straight onto the CD (no reformatting or anything), and it would only work in a CD player if I copied WAV files.
I’m no expert but isn’t *.cda * the file exstension for CD music?
Yes, but there really isn’t any such thing as a .cda file. If you open up an audio CD in Windows Explorer, you’ll see that the .cda files are all very small–they really just contain information about where the track is physically located.
If so, it’s only because that CD player was set up to understand the .wav format.
WAV files are often encoded using PCM (pulse code modulation), the same as audio CDs. So, in a sense, WAV could be considered to be “CD format,” but WAV files do not have to be 44.1 KHz PCM, like audio CDs do, and WAV files have extra info to specify the encoding and file type, which audio CDs do not. Your CD burning program still had to convert the WAV files before being written to CD. If this is a regular CD player (i.e. not a MP3 CD player, not a DVD player, etc.) and it worked then the program did not copy the files “straight onto the CD”, it converted the WAV files to the correct PCM format before burning the disc as an audio CD.
Audio CDs are different from CD-ROMs, they don’t have a filesystem (songs on an audio CD are not files) and each song occupies a seperate track, whereas most CD-ROMs have a single track containing the filesystem and data.
AFAIK, Audiograbber doesn’t have a wave editor at all. Audacity to the rescue!
when i look at music cds on my computer, it always displays the individual tracks as .aiff files
I agree this is a legitimate use, and if I were the OP I’d do exactly that, but the fact that you own the original LPs/cassettes doesn’t make downloading any more legal.
This is similar to those .cda files in Windows. Your OS is presenting the tracks as audio files for convenience, but the files don’t really exist on the CD.
Considering the state of electronics in the late '70s, the complexity of the CD standard is pretty impressive.
Here’s a page on the basic mechanics of audio CDs
And here’s the next page, an overview of the data format of audio CDs