3. Ripping from CD
The next step is to get the music into your computer and into the format that the CD burner uses. What you'll be creating in the next 5 steps is a Burn List - a collection of files arranged in a playlist in preparation for burning. We'll start by adding some CD tracks to your Burn List. Then we'll move on to MP3s and other sources, such as records and tapes.
First, rip the tracks you want from your CDs. "Ripping" is the computer techie word for extracting tracks from CD as wave files without losing much quality. If you want to know more about ripping, click here. So, grab one of the CDs from your pile and put it in. Open RipEditBurn Plus. Click the Rip tab at the top of the program to bring up the Rip module. You should see all the tracks on your audio CD listed - if you don't, click Refresh CD. Now, select the track or tracks you want. You have two choices at this point. You can either rip them directly to the Burn List or rip one at a time to the Edit window. If you don't want to do any editing click Rip to Burn and the track or tracks will be added directly to your Burn List. You could copy a whole CD this way, simply by selecting all the tracks and clicking Rip to Burn.
Though it is easier to simply dump things into the Burn window without editing them, your final CD will sound better if you take the time to edit each track. At the very least, you'll want to Normalize each track so that your final CD will have the same volume throughout. So click Rip to Edit to pull one track into the Edit window. You can only do one track at a time this way, since you can only open one track in the edit window at a time. Move to the next step for more information on editing.
