Ok, I'm not a noob to computing in general or even backing up a few DVDs. Been there. But I'm a total noob as to backing up Audio CDs. Can someone briefly and simply explain how this is done? A few steps, a popular/free program or two, a link to a guide...anything.

My situation is I have 3 audio CDs (shows as 1kb .cda in Explorer). I simply want to back up these 3 audio CDs both onto 1 DVD-R and 3 CD-Rs. I don't think I need anything fancy like encoding or converting. Just copy/burn.

Thank you in advance, I'm totally new here and so far I've downloaded the top 3 most popular encoder/rippers from download.com: Easy CD-DA Extractor, dBAmp Music Converter, CDex.

Do you want to convert these to MP3, then back them up onto your DVD?

For the CD's, stick them in Nero, clonecd, alcohol, etc, etc & Disc-copy. Simple as that
When you burn your Audio CD's 16x or 24x is recommended. There are ongoing arguments over jitter (introduced at high speeds) concerning Audio CD's, ten years after someone first complained


For your DVD, you can dump them as images, and burn the images ....
or you can use CDEX to dump all the tracks as WAV's and backup those....
Or you can use CDEX & LAME to dump, and encode them to ultra high quality, stereo, 320KB/s MP3's and backup those.

Nero does a great job on this and the OEM usually comes free with most drives.
Clone CD is a great one also! As far as DVD audio, you may be limited where you can play it. Most car players are CD only unless you have one of those shag wagons. LOL

Create aimages and burn them then onto the CDs.
Use CDEx to rip the audio tracks from the cds, then burn them onto the dvd AS DATA using nero......

Apologies, initially posted on Audio forum, but then I noticed how little action and activity happens there. So I figured I'd get a much faster, bigger audience in this newbie forum.

As to someone's question. No, don't really need .MP3 unless that 320k (max quality?) .MP3 is great sounding and cuts the memory to 1/3 or less. In other words, could it put all 3 of my CDs into 1 new mp3 CD?

When you want to copy from CD to CD and if you have 2 drives just do an on the fly copy (in Nero or any other burning app) or do as Chef said.
For DVD. If you want to lisen to the tracks on a DVD player you need to rip the CDs to Harddrive and use Software like audio dvd creator. Some Roxy products or Ulead products also give you this option. If you just want to have a copy on DVD just rip to data and burn as data to DVD.

Using CDEX -> to rip to MP3

You will need (obviously CDEX, but you already have that) and the lame codec.
If you google for Lame, you will find it anywhere. It needs to be installed as a codec (aka, right click & Install the .inf file) or a better solution is to download a codec pack like the k-lite mega codec pack which has every codec you'd every need for audio & video encoding & decoding and many you will likely never need too.

Once you've installed the pack, and you have CDEX installed (you may need
to restart the computer after the codec pack) fire up CDEX.

Click on the menu bar -> Options->Settings.
On the General Tab you can normalize the volumes (make all your songs the same loudness). However, this is generally not needed, unless you are adding songs from many CD's from many, many years (new songs are normalised to a higher volume, but at the sacrifice of dynamic range).

On the Filenames tab->
Set your File name format as "%1 - %4" Which will come out as "Artist - songname". If you want more info like album name, song number, etc, click the "?" next to it and it'll tell you what all the %x's mean.

Setup your output directorys "Desktop\MP3" perhaps?

On the CD-ROM tab->
Click Autodetect.
OPTIONAL: tick "Use Native NT SCSI Library" if you have any problems at the ripping part.

On the ENCODER tab ->
Set the thread priority to lowest (so it doesn't lock up your system while it's encoding).
Set your encoder to "Lame MP3 Encoder (version x.xxxx, yada yada)".
Set your encoder options to "MPEG1" bitrate Min "320" Max "320".
Set the mode to stereo.

Set quality to VERY HIGH QUALITY (q=0).

*side note* Usually I use Variable Bit Rate rather than constant bitrate, with Min set as 64Kbps & VBR method as VBR-New. VBR allocates high bitrate where it's needed & little where there is no need. Also J-Stereo is also more than adequate for music. J-stereo compares the left & right, then make one of them the difference between itself & the other. It does throw away phase information though, but not a huge problem when your speakers are only a few meters apart
Stereo & CBR will take up heaps more space, but at slightly better quality. (according to audiophiles which have nothing better to do than sit at their PC and compare the outputs of both in minute detail)
*/end side note*

It also doesn't hurt to tick "On the Fly MP3 encoding" which doesn't take up any HD space (except for the final MP3 of course).

On the REMOTE CDDB select a remote CDDB server (what's there is generally fine).
And stick in your email address.

OK

Back on the main screen.
Put your audio CD into the drive that shown on the drop box. Wait 10 seconds for it to automatically query the CD.
It'll fill the screen with boxes.

Make sure they are all ticked

On the right are a bunch of icons. If it hasn't filled in the artist, title & song names, then click the CDDB icon (second one from the bottom.

Wait twenty seconds for it to query the CD DataBase server to get your cd info.

Click the MP3 icon, the second one down (the 3rd will extract PART of a track only).
And wait 10-15 minutes for it to convert your Audio CD to MP3

No worries

for a simble burn rip to windows media player then burn to disk no hassle

You may be right, but please don't cross-post again. If you want a thread moved, then just PM the moderator for that section.

(Thread from Audio forum merged with this one; some posts deleted and hope the rest make sense...)