Good evening everybody, I need a little help. The way I read it is if I try to burn some wave music onto a music cd windows media player will convert those files into mp3 or the like and that's what will be recorded onto my cd.
Is that correct???
All I'm trying to do is to burn my paid for downloaded concerts in wave format onto a cd to play in my stereo.
Your files shouldn't be converted to mp3 unless you're burning a data disc. When you burn mp3 files to a disc in a standard audio CD format, they are converted to a WAV in the burning process.
This is why I'm puzzled here's an excerpt from the help icon
Burn an audio CD
If you want to make a standard music CD that will play in nearly any CD player, choose the Audio CD option.
As you burn an audio CD, Windows Media Player makes temporary copies of the WMA and MP3 files in your burn list, converts the copies to another format (known as PCM), and then saves the converted copies to the disc. Here's how to burn an audio CD:
PCM is an audio format (stands for Pulse Code Modulation). WAV files are coded as LPCM (stands for Linear Pulse Code Modulation). The Audio of a raw WAV file will have to be slighty encoded to be read as CD audio in the burning process. The same happens to compressed audio in the burning process.
Most ears will never notice this slight conversion.
Thanks. After I burn a cd and look at the songs I tried right clicking and bringing up the properties and the type of files was no longer there, that was why I also was curious.
So my files will stay as wave only very slightly altered, I take it Nero 9 and the rest of them do the same thing. The thing I like about the media player is that it has the no gap feature. When I'm listening to the band drift seamlessly from one song to another it's nice not to hear that 2 second pause (dead air)
You're welcome man. No need to worry, the WAV files you're burning are going to stay in tact. All audio burning suites use the same process when burning audio files.
Windows Media Player has fixed my only real gripe about it over the years with the gapless burning feature this time around. There is nothing worse than hearing a gap between tracks when they're not supposed to be there. If I decide to use a lossy audio compression format in windows I usually go with WMA, just because of it's seamless playback ability in Media Player.
So my files will stay as wave only very slightly altered, I take it Nero 9 and the rest of them do the same thing. The thing I like about the media player is that it has the no gap feature. When I'm listening to the band drift seamlessly from one song to another it's nice not to hear that 2 second pause (dead air)
The "no gap" feature is actually called, "Disk At Once" and is part of the Red Book standard for audio CDs, the laser stays on for the whole burn process. The format that uses a 2-second gap actually shuts the laser off betwenn tracks which used to cause an audible click on older CD players.
If the wav files are 44.1kHz at 16-bit (Red Book CD Standard) I don't think they're altered in any way except for possibly the header being removed.