How to Rip a CD

Q: How do I prepare a disc so I can post it?
A: This depends on the on the type of disc.

There are 3 types,

Audio-CD,
CDROM with wav's or aif's Akai/Roland discs

Type 1 Audio-CD -
There are many tools to save audio tracks as wav to your HD, Exact Audio Copy, Nero, CDRWin are a few.
After you saved them to HD compress with WinRAR.
You can compress the seperate tracks so people who miss a rar only miss one track.
Or you can do them in packs of 10 tracks.

In WinRAR check the Multimedia Compression option, and if you compress several tracks uncheck the Solid Archiveoption.

Don't make a disk image of an Audio-CD, this is completely unnescesary and only makes things more complicated.

Type 2 CDROM -
Usually these are grouped in a number of folders.
Start up WinRAR, highlight a folder and compress to your HD.
In the compression options check the Multimedia Compression option and uncheck the Solid Archive option.
Repeat this for the other folders and if there are many you can highlight several folders and compress them into the same archive.
Don't make a disk image of a CDROM, this is completely unnescesary and only makes things more complicated.

Type 3 Akai/Roland disc -
You must make a disk image of these. Use Nero or CDRWin to do this.

Nero:

On the menu click CD-Recorder > Save Track.

In the settings dialog click Select All.

Fill in the path and filename in their respective boxes.Click the Save button.

There is also the CD Copy option but this generates an NRG that is incompatible with the Mac world, so always use Save Track.

CDRWin:

Click the Extract Disc/Tracks/Sectors button (top middle)

Uncheck the RAW checkbox
This will create an image with a 2048 block size making the image smaller than with the standard 2352 block size.

Fill in the filename.

Click the Start button.

This will create a BIN and a CUE file, the CUE is just a text file with information about the location of the BIN and the type of BIN.
Since the path is also included in the CUE it is a good idea to open the CUE (with a simple text editor like "Notepad") and remove the path to the BIN,leaving just the filename. CDRWin can't find the BIN if it isn't located in the same folder as stated in the CUE. If you remove the path CDRWin will look for the BIN in the same folder as the CUE.
When you compress the image with WinRAR check the Multimedia Compression option. If you're unsure about proper settings or usage of WinRAR, click on the link: WinRAR FAQ