Topic: Why are my .wav files now .cda files?

[Josephine]

Okay . . . a probably really silly question, but I don't know the answer.

I went to transfer some of my old recordings that I burned as .wav files onto CDs to a new hard drive that I just got.  Instead of .wav files, however, I find .cda files which report as 1 kb in size.  What gives?   I don't understand.  Why did this happen?

Is there a way for me to change them back to .wav?

[jeromejello]

i THINK .cda are just the way the files are on an audio disc.  you need to extract them in order to get the data which would be the wav file you are looking for.

eac is the preferred way, but there are other extractors.

[jeromejello]

oh and here is a link to the extension archive

http://filext.com/detaillist.php?extdetail=cda&Search=Search

they are called CD Audio Track shortcuts

[Josephine]

Thank you.  I'm extracting them back into .wav format right now, as you suggested, with EAC.  I really appreciate your help.

Can you tell me why they were changed in the first place?  I just assumed that they were copying onto the discs the same  . . .
in other words, they were keeping their name and format.

[Roving Sign]

You will have to burn the wavs as a data disc if you want to keep the wav extention...but then its not really a "CD"

[flipp]

I've had this happen too. Have never been able to figure out why sometimes the extensions are .cda and other times .wav when the procedure to create the discs is the same. No problems extracting or playing either way, only thing that bothers me is I can't tell the size of the file when Windows Explorer shows the .cda extension.

[Josephine]

You will have to burn the wavs as a data disc if you want to keep the wav extention...but then its not really a "CD"

And if I were to burn them as a data disc, then they would most likely not play in my car stereo; right?

What bums me out about converting the .cda file back into .wav format is that now, instead of the original track name of
Los Lobos 2006-10-13 d1t2, I now have plain old Track 2.  I will have to make separate folders for each disc or rename each track.

[Nick Graham]

I went to transfer some of my old recordings that I burned as .wav files onto CDs to a new hard drive that I just got.

What bums me out about converting the .cda file back into .wav format is that now, instead of the original track name of
Los Lobos 2006-10-13 d1t2, I now have plain old Track 2. 

Don't you have the FLACs? It'd be way faster and easier to just decode those files to wav, than extracting from an audio disc...plus you'd keep the file names intact.

[Josephine]

I went to transfer some of my old recordings that I burned as .wav files onto CDs to a new hard drive that I just got.

What bums me out about converting the .cda file back into .wav format is that now, instead of the original track name of
Los Lobos 2006-10-13 d1t2, I now have plain old Track 2. 

Don't you have the FLACs? It'd be way faster and easier to just decode those files to wav, than extracting from an audio disc...plus you'd keep the file names intact.

No, Nick.  Wish I did.  My old computer died sometime back and lost a bunch of files.  Probably a couple dozen shows.  Luckily, I had at least burned them to CD.  I thought I was covered until today, when I went to load them onto a hard drive and discovered they were no longer in .wav form.   
 

[Gordon]

I went to transfer some of my old recordings that I burned as .wav files onto CDs to a new hard drive that I just got.

What bums me out about converting the .cda file back into .wav format is that now, instead of the original track name of
Los Lobos 2006-10-13 d1t2, I now have plain old Track 2. 

Don't you have the FLACs? It'd be way faster and easier to just decode those files to wav, than extracting from an audio disc...plus you'd keep the file names intact.

No, Nick.  Wish I did.  My old computer died sometime back and lost a bunch of files.  Probably a couple dozen shows.  Luckily, I had at least burned them to CD.  I thought I was covered until today, when I went to load them onto a hard drive and discovered they were no longer in .wav form.   
 

my 2 cents.  you torrent ALL your shows as far as I can tell.  this is when you ask your leechers for a favor.  you need the flacs for your own archive etc.  someone will be more than happy to reseed or torrent or freebie etc.  I've had to do it a few times when I didn't back up a show of my own.  if the torrents are long dead check db.etree for folks with your shows and hit them up for the flacs.

[Josephine]

I went to transfer some of my old recordings that I burned as .wav files onto CDs to a new hard drive that I just got.

What bums me out about converting the .cda file back into .wav format is that now, instead of the original track name of
Los Lobos 2006-10-13 d1t2, I now have plain old Track 2. 

Don't you have the FLACs? It'd be way faster and easier to just decode those files to wav, than extracting from an audio disc...plus you'd keep the file names intact.

No, Nick.  Wish I did.  My old computer died sometime back and lost a bunch of files.  Probably a couple dozen shows.  Luckily, I had at least burned them to CD.  I thought I was covered until today, when I went to load them onto a hard drive and discovered they were no longer in .wav form.   
 

my 2 cents.  you torrent ALL your shows as far as I can tell.  this is when you ask your leechers for a favor.  you need the flacs for your own archive etc.  someone will be more than happy to reseed or torrent or freebie etc.  I've had to do it a few times when I didn't back up a show of my own.  if the torrents are long dead check db.etree for folks with your shows and hit them up for the flacs.

Not a bad idea, Gordon.  Thanks.   There were a few shows that were never torrented (Nickel Creek and another artist), but the rest were torrented at some point.  Many of them were a very long time ago and are no longer on any tracker.  I'll check out db.etree and see if I can't get some help.  It will sure beat having to rename all these tracks. 

[Gordon]

I went to transfer some of my old recordings that I burned as .wav files onto CDs to a new hard drive that I just got.

What bums me out about converting the .cda file back into .wav format is that now, instead of the original track name of
Los Lobos 2006-10-13 d1t2, I now have plain old Track 2. 

Don't you have the FLACs? It'd be way faster and easier to just decode those files to wav, than extracting from an audio disc...plus you'd keep the file names intact.

No, Nick.  Wish I did.  My old computer died sometime back and lost a bunch of files.  Probably a couple dozen shows.  Luckily, I had at least burned them to CD.  I thought I was covered until today, when I went to load them onto a hard drive and discovered they were no longer in .wav form.   
 

my 2 cents.  you torrent ALL your shows as far as I can tell.  this is when you ask your leechers for a favor.  you need the flacs for your own archive etc.  someone will be more than happy to reseed or torrent or freebie etc.  I've had to do it a few times when I didn't back up a show of my own.  if the torrents are long dead check db.etree for folks with your shows and hit them up for the flacs.

 It will sure beat having to rename all these tracks. 

plus you will have the original lossless files

[Josephine]

Are the .cda files lossy? 

[Gordon]

Are the .cda files lossy? 

no but anytime you extract you could bring in errors.  EAC is great if you have it configured correctly.  that can take some time and can be a pain in the ass.

edit:  that is why a DAT > soundcard  > wav > flac transfer is prefferd to a DAT > standalone > EAC > CD > flac

[twatts (pants are so over-rated...)]

.cda is just the file extension used for audio CDs.  .wav is the same thing, but with a PC extension.  Basically, when you burn .wav files to an audio CDR, it does whatever it does and burns the PC files as audio files (.cda).

If you were to burn a data CDR containing your .wav files, the extensions would show .wav, but you couldn't play this in a CD Player - its not an Audio CDR.

EAC will losslessly extract the audio data from an Audio CDR to your PC and save them as .wav.  You can set up EAC to rename the files as they extract so you don't have to name them.  Although EAC can produce lossless .wav file from CDRs, it is not 'perfect'.  Extracting like this assumes the Audio CDR was burned without errors, etc.  Audio CDRs don't have the same data verification that data CDRs have.

With that in mind, many folks convert to FLAC and then burn those FLAC files as data files onto data CDRs.  Later, you can use WinAmp to listen from the FLAC files directly, or convert the FLAC files back to .wav for burning to Audio CDR.  This way, every Audio CDR is a perfect copy of the original (assuming there are no burning errors).

ETREE has a crap ton of info about this...

Terry