I enjoy making "mixtape" CDs of my favorite cuts from my CD collection. Back when I was still able to work, and had a regular paycheck, I would often buy a whole CD, just to get a single song! Now that I have a hand-me-down CD burner I am collecting those songs onto CD-Rs, and then I plan to sell the original CDs to the used record store, because I am always so short of cash these days.
So, here's my question:
When I copy a song from the original CD to a CD-R, I first rip it to my computer's hard drive as a WAV or FLAC file. Then I burn it from that file onto the CD-R as a CDA file. Let's call this CDR #1
So, what if I delete that WAV or FLAC file from my hard drive, sell the original CD, and then one day, want to copy one of the songs from the CD-R?
Suppose I then rip the song from the CDA on CDR #1 to a WAV file on my HD. And then burn it from the WAV file on my HD to a CDA file on CD-R #2.
I'm wondering how the quality of the various CDA files will compare to each other:
CDA on Original factory CD
CDA burned to CD-R#1 from WAV file ripped from orignal CD
CDA burned to CD #2 from WAV file ripped from CD-R #1
I'm old enough to have spent a lot of time in my younger years copying music from LPs to 1/4" tape. And then copying from tape to tape using two tape recorders. In those days, every time you made a copy, the copy was always audibly much worse in quality.
So, what's the best way to archive music tracks on CD-Rs? For example, could I burn a WAV file to a data CD? And if so, would that be a better way to archive the song than as a CDA burned from a WAV which had been ripped from a CD?
Whew! That ended up being a complicated and tortuous post. My apologies and gratitude to anyone who goes to the trouble of reading it and replying to it. I'll try to be more concise in future posts.
