How To Duplicate A CD

By Tim Gorman

In the day before laptops, it absolutely was a lot of easier to fit your pc with a secondary CD or DVD drive, that made the process of copying or duplicating a disc incredibly simple.

All it took was putting the original CD in the first drive, an empty CD in the burner drive, and hitting 'burn' within the CD duplicating program of your choice. With laptops, however, it's approximately as straightforward to suit another drive in the chassis - not that everybody would apprehend how to try and do it with a stationary computer either, but that's besides the point.

Thus, if you only have one CD or DVD drive, how do you do it? The most obvious method would be to repeat all the data on the disc onto your computers hard drive, removing the disc and replacing it with an empty one, and duplicate your files directly from the laborious drive onto the new medium. This can work fine for many discs (be it general knowledge, games, movies) but some can prove more problematic.

Music CD's, as an example, often use hidden files and a shortcut system, that means that if you simply open the disc and view the files on your pc, then copy them, all you'll copy could be a link to the file on the CD - hence the new CD can not work, as all it will have on it's shortcuts to files that don't exist on that medium.

Thus if you would like to duplicate a music CD, how do you get round the shortcut issue? Well, there are many ways. What might well be the best is to make use of a program that you will probably have on your laptop already, namely Windows Media Player.

If you place the music CD into your laptop and open it with Windows Media Player, you'll be given the choice to 'rip' the music, that means that that the software can copy the music files onto your exhausting drive (normally they will be put in My Music, within the My Documents folder). Once that has been done, you may be in a position to repeat the files onto a blank medium employing a CD burning program of your alternative (e.g. Nero, or Windows designed in burning perform).

If you dislike duplicating a mess of files onto your onerous drive, you could download a compression program such as Winrar. Once put in, this will allow you to right-click on the CD drive below 'My Pc' and select 'Save to archive' - if you are doing this and select to avoid wasting it as an ISO file, it will duplicate the CD or DVDs content onto your hard drive as one file.

Most decent burning applications can then be in a position to repeat the files onto an empty disc directly from the ISO file, unpacking the file as it goes. This makes the method less messy, and saves a little bit of disc house (that, as you'll understand, is notably valuable on laptops!). - 31403

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