Mp3 faq - WAV files from MP3 files using Winamp

ow do I create audio CDs from my MP3 files using Winamp and Easy CD Creator?

Convert your MP3 files to WAV files first. This is easy to do - almost all MP3 players can do it.. e.g. with Winamp, press Ctl-P to get Preferences, then select Output in the left hand window, then select Nullsoft Disk Writer plug-in in the left window... then press the Configure button to choose which directory you want your WAV files saving in. After you do this, every time you "play" a file in Winamp, it will actually be output to a WAV file in your chosen directory. To go back to actually playing files, bring Preferences up again, and select Output and Nullsoft WaveOut plug-in, which is your normal sound playing output plugin.

Once you have converted the songs you want to WAV files, fire up Easy CD Creator, and select the Audio CD tab (*not* the data CD tab), and drag and drop your WAV files into your CD layout, arranging them in the order you want... then select Create CD from the main menu to burn the CD.

That's pretty much it. There are a couple of wrinkles:

1) You have to have enough hard-disk space available for all the WAV files you want to go on your CD... this will be over 700 Mbs for a full audio CD.

2) To be burned onto a CD the WAV files must be 16 bit stereo sampled at 44.1 KHz - Easy CD Creator will reject them otherwise (well maybe it accepts mono... but the sampling rate has to be right). If you are unfortunate enough to have MP3 files for which someone has used a different sampling rate (e.g. people recording off TV seem to use 48 KHz a lot for some reason), then you will have to "resample" the WAV files before they can be burned onto CD. You will need an audio editing program to do this. I would recommend Goldwave (www.goldwave.com)

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