Beatles won't play from hard drive

Hi,
I burned all my ancient Beatles cassette tapes to a couple of CD's, and the CD's play fine when inserted in the PC disk drive.
But when I saved the tracks from the CD's to my hard drive they refuse to play from there, no matter which prog I use to try to start it (VLC/ Quicktime/Win Media Player, Media Player classic)
(I'd prefer playing from the hard drive to save mechanical wear and tear on my disk drive and CD's)
I see the tracks on the CD's are .CDA format whatever that is, I don't know if it's relevant.
I'm Win XP Home,any advice?
Thanks

When you say "saved" the files from the CD, what specifically did you do? To extract playable files from CD tracks, you will need to rip the CD, burning or playing software commonly has a rip option, to create files in various formats such as .WAV, .MP3, .WMA etc.

How were the tracks from tape burned to the CDs? If it was done on that computer, you should be able to find the .WAV files the CD was burned from.

I see the tracks on the CD's are .CDA format whatever that is, I don't know if it's relevant.

The CDA files are not the actual music. They are pointers on the CD that windows would use to play the music from the CD.

You need to convert from CD to .wav, or .mp3 or .flac etc.

You will need software for that. I don't have any that I use for that to recommend.

Let me research.

Roger

OK, here is one, read the warning and be careful to avoid installing a toolbar.

Freemake Audio Converter converts audio free to MP3, WMA, WAV, FLAC, AAC, M4A, OGG, convert audio to MP3 player, iPod, iPhone, iPad, PSP, extract audio from video, join audio files. NOTE! This is ADWARE, it includes a browser toolbar(bing or facemoods). It can be disabled when installing.

http://www.videohelp.com/tools/Freemake-Audio-Converter

When you say "saved" the files from the CD, what specifically did you do?..

It was over a year ago and i can't remember the details, I simply followed the instructions in a "How to burn music tapes to disk" tutorial i found on the net.
As I recall, I had to simply plug my tape cassette player into my PC to transfer the songs to my hard drive, then burn them to CD from there, it went off without a hitch.
I then threw away the tapes and deleted the songs from my hard drive (mistake) because I had them on the two disks.
So now I want to copy the songs from the disks back onto my hard drive but don't know how to do it, the copy/paste routine won't work because it sees only the CDA pointer and can't get its teeth into the songs themselves to pick them up.

Hi MickinPlymouth,

As an alternative to Freemake Audio Converter I can recommend two products from NCH - www.nch.com - 'Express Rip' and 'Switch sound file converter'. The first is, I think, 'free', the second has a licence fee but is worth it. With both, just put your CD into the drive, stop it if it starts to play, and run whichever ripper you want to use. Tell it where you want the files, let it do its thing, and your music will be on your hard drive.

You must have used some software to record the audio stream from your tapes in the first place. If you still have that, it may do the job for you from your CDs. I convert tapes from time to time and use Magix Audio Cleaning Lab for the job. This does a fine job of recording and you can use it to clean up the audio - remove tape hiss, switching crashes etc.. So long as you don't expect to get CD quality sound from CDs originally recorded from, I presume, C90 type cassettes.

Chris Cosgrove

This has worked pretty good for me, I addition I use it to correct 78RPM records recorded on a 45RPM turntable.
It has settings last time i used it that did the job.

Audacity® is free, open source, cross-platform software for recording and editing sounds.
http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

Roger

Thanks guys but I seem to have muddled through by having one last rummage around my Win Media Player in XP by inserting a Beatles CD, right-clicking on its name('Unknown Album') in WMP, then clicking 'Rip', and bingo the CD began auto-copying itself into the WMP Library!
I can then remove the disk and play from the Library.
It's been a hard day's night but I got there in the end..

Yep, that'll do the job. Glad you got it sorted.