While copying music from the computer to a USB stick is a trivial operation, where you just need to drag the music files from the computer folder to the USB stick folder, the speech of copying a music CD on a USB stick is different . This is because normal CDs do not store music as MP3 files, but as CDA files, which are not compressed and take up too much space to be dragged from the CD folder to the stick.
What you need, therefore, is a simple and immediate program that allows you to convert the CD files and then copy the music on disk or on the USB stick to be able to listen to them from any device with USB port.
To do this, the only requirement is to have a computer with a CD-ROM drive, which is essential for reading the data on the disc.
As a program you can use, on Windows 7, Windows 8 and Windows 10 PCs, the good old Windows Media Player, which even if it is no longer updated by Microsoft, is still usable by launching it from the Start menu.
Then open Windows Media Player, connect the USB stick and insert the CD to be copied into the player.
The USB stick must be formatted, then before starting, open the folder of This PC (or Computer), to see all the internal and external disks, then locate the USB drive icon, right-click on it and click on Format.
If in doubt, refer to the guide to format USB flash drives.
Once you open Windows Media Player and find the audio CD icon on the list in the left column, which should appear as an unknown album or with the title of the CD.
When you select the title of the CD to listen to it, you will see two buttons at the top, one to make the CD copy, the other to configure the copy settings.
Before pressing the copy, it is therefore convenient, only the first time, to press on copy settings from CD .
From the options menu you can choose:
- the format of the files ripped from the CD, which can be saved on PC in MP3 or Windows Media Audio format or even FLAC.
- The quality of the audio, which can be 128 Kbps or higher (the higher the quality, the more the file takes up space on disk and on USB stick)
- Going to Other options you can choose in which folder to save the extracted and ripped files from the CD .
Here you can select the USB stick directly or, to store them, in a folder on the PC disk which can then be used to copy the extracted files with a simple copy and paste.
At this point you can press the Copy from CD button to start the "ripping" operation which will end when all the files are copied " to the multimedia catalog ".
At that point, opening the folder selected in the copy options, you will find the music files saved in the chosen format and included in a folder that has the album name.
If the CD had been recognized by Windows Media Player, each file will have the title of the song as its name.
Another way of copying music from an audio CD is through the iTunes program for Windows and also for Mac.
In iTunes, once you insert an audio CD into your computer's player, a disc icon appears in the top center that can be clicked to listen to the various tracks.
From the list of songs, you can press the Import CD button on the right to save all the audio tracks as files on the PC disk or on a USB stick.
The CD import settings allow you to choose the file format, between AAC and MP3, and then the quality from the second drop-down menu.
Music is saved from iTunes in the default folder Music \ iTunes \ iTunes Media \ Music, where the copied CD with its name and all the ripped tracks in the chosen format are found.
The mp3 or m4a files can then be copied to a USB stick using copy and paste or drag and drop from the folder.
Other ways of copying music from CD to disc or to USB stick are possible using programs to extract music from an audio CD such as the popular and customizable CDEX.
