Saving your own audio CDs as FLAC or MP3 with Burn by Zaweba
Burn by Zaweba reads your own audio CDs and saves the tracks as FLAC, MP3 or WAV, tagged and filed by album, with FLAC and WAV checked bit for bit.
Shelves of CDs are lovely until you want the music on a computer or phone. Save audio CD as files, a tool in Burn by Zaweba, reads your own audio CDs and saves the tracks as files you can play anywhere, filed neatly by album.
It is careful about accuracy, too, which matters if you are only going to do this once per disc.
Opening the tool
Save audio CD as files is on the home screen and on the Tools menu. Put one of your own audio CDs in the drive and open it.
Choosing a format
There are three formats. FLAC is exact: it is compressed, but every bit of the music is kept, so it is the one to choose if you want a lasting copy of the CD. MP3 makes smaller files that play on almost anything, at the cost of some detail. WAV is uncompressed and exact, but takes the most space and holds tags less well than the others in many players.
A common plan is FLAC for your library and MP3 copies made from it later for a phone or car. Saving as FLAC first keeps that option open.
Names and tags
The tracks are tagged from CD-Text when the disc has it, so the album, artist and track names come across by themselves. When the disc has no CD-Text, you can type the names in. Each album is saved in a folder of its own, so a stack of CDs turns into a tidy music folder rather than a pile of Track 01 files.
Take a moment over the names before you save. Fixing a spelling now is far quicker than fixing tags across a library later.
How Burn reads the disc
The reading is plain and honest. Burn reads each part of the disc with up to three tries. If a sector still cannot be read, the job stops with a message rather than carrying on and quietly saving a damaged track.
For FLAC and WAV, there is an extra step. After saving, Burn decodes the files back and compares them bit for bit with what was read from the disc. That way you know the file on your PC holds exactly what came off the CD.
When a disc won't read
Scratched and dirty discs are the usual cause of a stop. Clean the disc gently, from the centre outwards, and try again. Trying another drive can also help, since drives differ in how well they cope with worn discs. If a disc still can't be read in full, Burn has told you so honestly, which is better than a track that clicks halfway through.
This tool is for your own audio CDs. Burn never works around copy protection, and it reads exactly what the drive returns.
From CD to files and back again
Saving a CD as files is the reverse of making an audio CD. Once your music is on the PC as FLAC or MP3, you can build new audio CDs from it on the Audio CD page, with your own track order and normalised volume, or put hours of it on an MP3 data disc for the car. The files can also go into Play by Zaweba to listen on the PC. Burn by Zaweba keeps the whole round trip in one place.
