Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Hot air and ill-informed banter

It may be funny to you motherfucker, but it’s not funny to me.

Ah, the different things are different argument.

Everybody saw this coming.

No Justins, No Peace

Pessimism assures that nothing of any importance will change.

And now I have baud making fun of me. this day can’t get worse.

Since when do we limit our critiques to things we could do better ourselves?

White supremacy is terrorism.

If you are still in the GOP, you are an extremist.

“Everybody’s entitled to be an idiot.”

Don’t expect peaches from an apple tree.

We’ll be taking my thoughts and prayers to the ballot box.

“Cheese and Kraken paired together for the appetizer trial.”

fuckem (in honor of the late great efgoldman)

This has so much WTF written all over it that it is hard to comprehend.

Following reporting rules is only for the little people, apparently.

Spilling the end game before they can coat it in frankl luntz-approved dogwhistles.

Stamping your little feets and demanding that they see how important you are? Not working anymore.

Authoritarian republicans are opposed to freedom for the rest of us.

There are consequences to being an arrogant, sullen prick.

I’d try pessimism, but it probably wouldn’t work.

Teach a man to fish, and he’ll sit in a boat all day drinking beer.

Why is it so hard for them to condemn hate?

You are here: Home / Science & Technology / Another Tech Help Bleg

Another Tech Help Bleg

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Trying to convert some .cda files on a cd my father gave me to something usable ( .wav, .mp3, etc.). I need a free program to do this since all of my programs (Roxio, Nero, Soundbooth and the list goes on) will not perform this function, and I don’t want to spend 40 bucks on AVS to remove their obnoxious stamp. Any suggestions?

*** Update ***

EAC was EXACTLY what the doctor ordered.

Reader Interactions

38Comments

  3. 3.

    stuckinred

    #

    Learn how the files work. CDs use CDA file,s which really are just pointers to the music and aren’t actual files you can copy. CDA files don’t even really exist on a music CD, they are merely files created by the computer’s CD drivers that point to the location of a track. MP3 is a file type that uses compression to save space.
    #
    2

    Make space for your files. When you convert files from CDA you are copying analog data from its location on the disk, converting it to digital format and storing it somewhere else. You need to have a folder for the music to go into and you need to have enough space to store all of the music you want to copy. This process is commonly referred to as “ripping.” On average, you’ll probably need about one megabyte for every minute of music you want to store.
    #
    3

    Choose a program. In order to rip CD music into MP3 format, you need a software program. You can use iTunes or Windows Media Player for free, and there are dozens of other free programs. Windows Media player is already available as part of Windows and iTunes is a free download but also comes with access to a digital music and has an excellent program for looking up the titles for your music and attaching them to the MP3 files. This is important because CDA files don’t have the song titles attached to them.

    Read more: How to Convert CDA Files to MP3 | eHow.com http://www.ehow.com/how_4903021_convert-cda-files-mp.html#ixzz15T38T6Rj

  5. 5.

    Sebastian

    Audiograbber is among the best. Don’t forget to install the LAME MP3 encoder – you can find that one on AG’s download page.

    AG is around since Napster and the LAME encoder is the probably the best encoder you can find. And it’s free!

    Whatever you do, avoid the XING MP3 encoder, which is fast (doesn’t matter anymore with modern CPUs) but crappy.

  9. 9.

    BruceK

    Yeah, the .cda files, if I read stuff right, are just index pointers leading to the actual standard CD tracks. Those should be rippable to .mp3 using iTunes, Windows Media Player, or what have you. The CD has to be read as an audio CD, though; the sound info isn’t in the .cda files.

  10. 10.

    mark

    erightsoft’s free Super.

    ” SUPER © does for FREE what other encoders CAN’T do for money.

    o SUPER © IS UNIVERSAL as it supports a wide variety of input/source file format to play
    or encode (to & from) without any additional third party software.

    If you need a simple, yet very efficient tool to convert (encode) or play any Multimedia file,
    without reading manuals or spending long hours training, then SUPER © is all you need.
    It is a Multimedia Encoder and a Multimedia Player, easy-to-use with 1 simple click.”

    I use it all the time, seriously, like almost every day.

    its free, works great, and really is easy.
    I do not work for them or anyone that knows who they are. i think they might even be based in europe maybe?

  11. 11.

    mark

    @mark: sorry, that wasn’t my words right, it didn’t quote in the right place.

    erightsoft’s free Super.

    ” SUPER © does for FREE what other encoders CAN’T do for money.

    o SUPER © IS UNIVERSAL as it supports a wide variety of input/source file format to play
    or encode (to & from) without any additional third party software.

    If you need a simple, yet very efficient tool to convert (encode) or play any Multimedia file,
    without reading manuals or spending long hours training, then SUPER © is all you need.
    It is a Multimedia Encoder and a Multimedia Player, easy-to-use with 1 simple click.”

    I use it all the time, seriously, like almost every day.

    its free, works great, and really is easy.
    I do not work for them or anyone that knows who they are. i think they might even be based in europe maybe?

  14. 14.

    PopeRatzy

    Gin & Tonic is correct, the best by far and away is EAC. Many rippers out there will gloss over errors. EAC when used in Test & Copy mode is a flat guarantee that the rip is clean (if CRCs match the rip is perfect). Add in the use of AccurateRip to verify and you are in the sweet spot for audio quality.

    If you do not care then Itunes and any of the plethora of other generic rippers out there will work.

  16. 16.

    mark

    @Sebastian:

    thanks for this info, i was indeed curious as to why a lot of the sound-related stuff i like wasn’t from Asia like most electronics. This answers that and makes sense

  18. 18.

    The Golux

    Another vote here for EAC. The AccurateRip feature (in which the sumcheck for each track is compared to the value obtained by others) is great, giving peace of mind that the resulting file is byte-perfect.

    One caveat: If you have a badly scratched CD, EAC will spend a long time trying to make sense of it, though you can switch to a less-persnickety ripping algorithm in such cases. Usually, human ears can’t tell the difference.

  19. 19.

    luc

    Actually, all the programs you mentioned in the first place (Roxio, Nero, …) will, to my knowledge also do the ripping of the audio CD – perhaps not if the CD has some copy protection.
    It is only a matter of finding the correct menu entry – since they are all stuffed to the brink with the mostly useless features.

  20. 20.

    Sebastian

    @different church-lady:
    Heh, yeah.
    Here is the complete line-up of the Record Label Dragon Slayers aka ISO MPEG Audio Layer III Working Group:

    Professor Hans-Georg Musmann (Univ. Hannover, Germany, Chairman)
    Karlheinz Brandenburg (Germany)
    Leon van de Kerkhof (The Netherlands)
    Gerhard Stoll (Germany)
    Leonardo Chiariglione (Italy)
    Yves-François Dehery (France)
    James D. Johnston (USA)

  22. 22.

    Roger Moore

    @stuckinred:

    __
    When you convert files from CDA you are copying analog data from its location on the disk, converting it to digital format and storing it somewhere else.

    Not quite. The data on the CD is digital, which was the whole reason CDs were such a big deal in the first place. The problem is that it’s just written to the CD as a string of numbers (with error correction) rather than packaged up in a conventional file on a conventional filesystem. So you need a program (a “ripper”) that will read the digital data off the disk and convert it into a standard format computer file, usually .WAV.

  23. 23.

    El Cid

    Anyone that has RealPlayer (yes, I really do actually like it, though now much prefer VLC for video) it’s included as well.

  25. 25.

    El Cid

    Anyone who’s curious to see if they can hear any difference with higher resolution audio (and not just from DVDs, BluRays, and rarer special player formats) can try on their computer the limited tracks available on HDTracks.com.

  26. 26.

    MaximusNYC

    I second the suggestion of SUPER from eRightSoft. It’s a freebie, but extremely good at transcoding just about any audio or video file I’ve ever thrown at it. And I produce a lot of music and video, sometimes using sampled material from different sources.

    Download link is at the bottom of this page:

    http://www.erightsoft.com/S6Kg1.html

  29. 29.

    Peter J

    And yet another vote for EAC, but with the caveat that for the perfect copy you need to do a bit more than just start and rip. There are other programs that are easier and simpler to use, but they won’t give you perfect copies.

  30. 30.

    Mike Toreno

    I think your only problem is that you thought about what you want to do using the “wrong” language. You do not want to “convert cda files,” you want to rip a CD. That’s easy, tons of stuff to do it, like everybody says. Windows Media 10 is fine. One thing I don’t see mentioned in the comments is, make sure to look at your tags (which tell track name, artist, album, year, genre, etc.) and fix the tags like you want. Letting the software set your tags automatically works the great bulk of the time, but sometimes it doesn’t do it (especially with audiobooks) and sometimes its a pain, like if you have a compilation album with songs by 20 different artists, so that when you rip the CD each song is tagged by a different artist and the songs are scattered all over your database when you choose sort by artist.

  33. 33.

    MikeJ

    @Mike Toreno: MusicBrainz Picard an fix up tags if it can make any guess as to what the file is. And if it can’t tell from partial tags or filenames, it can listen to the song look it up online.

    iTunes set tags while ripping, buts gets data from a lousy database. You’ll be much happier with the results from a quick run through Picard.

  35. 35.

    Comrade Mary

    Hadn’t heard of EAC, but I’ll have to try it.

    Rule of thumb: if you need good freeware or shareware, check SourceForge first. As mentioned above, it has Audacity, but also FileZilla (the only FTP software you need) and Kompozer, a pretty decent lightweight HTML authoring tool.

  36. 36.

    Maude

    @Comrade Mary:
    Sourceforge is the premier open source download site. You can trust the files you download.
    I’ve used it for years and it is great.
    Glad to hear it mentioned.
    They also have tutorials and some of them are a bit technical and make you want to tear your hair out.

  37. 37.

    Banzai Bunny

    I used EAC to digitize my entire CD collection. 1500 discs over the course of about a year. Works great.

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