Where do I post a CD ripping question?
 

I have a question about ripping an exact CD to my hard disk, where would i post please?

You will have to rip what they call an image of the CD
to your HD if it is a cda (music cd) format.
I use ImgBurn or Ashampoo burning studio to do this
and they are both free.
Ashampoo is the easier of the 2 to use right off.
Once you get it to your hard drive then you can
make another copy with the same program.
If it is a file type cd then you can use your OS software to copy to hard drive.

I would need to convert this image to an MP3 it's an audio CD i am staring with. ImgBurn for sure won't do that, not sure about Ashampoo.

Wow a premium member has to wait 2 1/2 days for a response. What is this site coming to?

If you have Windows OS then you only need to start Windows Media player and click the rip tab at the top, no need to rip an
exact copy if all you want is convert to MP3 or there are multitudes of progs for converting to MP3.

The tracks are mixed into one another (overlayed) it's like having one long MP3 track. Windows Media will not rip that as an exact copy, it will separate the tracks.

Not sure I know what you mean by overlayed and being mixed to into one another.
Please go into more details exactly what you need to do.

Questions on digital audio would be fine both in the DVD Projects > Edit Audio & Video forum, or simply the Digital Life > Computers forum. Both locations will work for audio topics. We'll move topics that are made in the wrong place, using the option that leaves temporary moved links for several days so you'll always know where it went.

On to the question...

If you want to rip an image, ImgBurn works fine for most CDs. Note that there are some protected discs and atypical compilation discs that don't rip well with ImgBurn, so you'd want to look at a non-free tool like CloneCD for those.

I prefer to rip as ISO files when using ImgBurn. By default, sometimes ImgBurn wants to save as a BIN/CUE file set, but I don't really like .bin/.cue files. Just my preference.

If you want to create MP3 files from an audio CD, then you're not looking to rip images. For that task, I use the very old Nero 6. If you have Nero, try it.

Another excellent tool -- and very popular amongst audio purists -- is the freeware tool EAC (Exact Audio Copy).

• Get it at http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/

Generally audio ripping tools make one MP3 file per track. It sounds like maybe you're wanting to merge all tracks into a single MP3 file?

EAC may have that option -- I can't test it right now -- so look in some of the advanced ripping options.

Ripping as WAV files, and then merging the WAVs in a freeware editor like Audacity is another option. Then you can convert the WAV to MP3 with any number of freeware converters. Audacity may have the ability to save as MP3, too -- can't test it right now myself. But it's something to look for.

Hope this helps. :)