Copying Existing Audio CDs

DART CD-Recorder Basic allows you to make copies/duplicates of existing audio CDs or CD+Text CDs, provided your PC is equipped with a supported CD-R or CD-RW drive.

Before you begin the process of reading and writing audio CDs, it is recommended that you assign which of the CD drives installed in your PC will perform either reading and/or writing duties in the CD-Recorder Basic utility.

Click on the View/Options/Devices menu.

Assign the Default CD Recorder device from the available pull-down menu. This will be the CD drive that will be used to write (“burn") your new audio CDs.

Assign the Default CD Reader device from the available pull-down menu. This will be the CD drive that will be used to read (“rip") audio CD tracks to the hard drive.

Assign the CD Reader drive letter, which must be the drive letter of the currently selected Default CD Reader device (above).

Step 1 - Reading audio tracks

1. Insert your source audio CD into the assigned Default CD-Reader drive. If any other software audio CD player program (“Windows Media Player", “WinAmp", “Real Player", etc.) starts automatically when you do this, close it prior to moving to step 2.

2. In the far-left section of the CD-Recorder Basic window, select a hard disk drive and directory (folder) where you want the WAVE files to be stored on your system (Example: "C:\My Music"). Do not select the CD drive where the audio CD is currently located. It makes no difference to our software which hard disk drive and/or folder that you use to store your WAVE files. What matters is that YOU know where you are putting them (so that they can be found later, if needed).

Note: You must copy the audio data to the hard drive first (and, in fact, it is far safer to do this anyway). It is not possible to create a "direct" CD-to-CD copy with our software, nor is it recommended using any companies' software, due to the likelihood of error and/or failure.

3. Once your folder is selected, click on the READ TRACK button on the Toolbar. You should see a message window stating that we are reading the CD's track list. If you are asked to look up the CD on the Internet, using the CDDB service, just hit No for now. You may very well want to use this service down the line, since we can use it to automatically fill in Disk title and track title information for the CD.

4. Select the track number that you want to get (by clicking on it) and then click Add. If you want the whole CD, you can click on Add all. We would also recommend that you select the Add tracks to playlist option, if it's not enabled already.

5. After that, click on OK at the bottom of the screen. Click OK on the copyright notice screen (but read it and understand it first). You should see that the drive starts reading data to the hard drive, one track at a time.

By reading tracks in this manner, you'll be creating files on your hard drive called .WAV files. Those files contain the audio. The audio data will be read and stored to the drive and folder you selected earlier.

After your tracks are read to the hard drive, you should see the track (WAV) listings on the far right (the Playlist), such as "track1.wav", "track2.wav", and so on. Take the audio CD out of the assigned CD-Reader drive.

Using CDDB

Using CD Text

Step 2 - Adjusting silence gaps between audio tracks (if desired)

DART CD-Recorder Basic allows you to individually adjust silence gaps between consecutive CD tracks. In order to do this, follow the steps below:

1. Click the playlist item using the right mouse button and select the Info command (or double-click the item) to evoke the File info dialog.

2. Modify the value displayed in the edit box entitled Gap time after this track in seconds (anything between 0 and 30 seconds).

3. If you want this time to be identical for all tracks, click the Apply to all button.

4. Click OK.

Each silence gap is attached to the soundfile it was defined for (always the one preceding the gap). Therefore if you change position of an audio file within the list the corresponding silence gap will move along with the file.

To help you adjust spacing between subsequent tracks, the actual size of silence gaps is retained when a particular item or all items on the playlist are played back.

Step 3 - Writing your WAVE files to a new, blank CD

When you are ready to record your CD, make sure you have a new, unformatted CD-R or CD-RW blank CD ready and insert it into your assigned Default CD-Recorder drive (from Step 1).

Note: We recommend using only CD-R media, due to a greater compatibility with consumer audio CD players. You will only want to use CD-RW media when burning CDs that you know will be played on CD-RW compatible audio CD players.

Click the WRITE TO AUDIO CD button on the toolbar or select the Write to audio CD command from the List menu.

WRITE TO AUDIO CD button

The settings in this window allow you to control:

The device used for CD recording (which is useful if your system is equipped with more than one CD-R or CD-RW drive).

The speed at which your CD will be written ("burned"). Note that the list of speeds provided are given to us by your CD-R or CD-RW drive as supported speeds for audio CD creation.

To enable any of the following other three options (below), click on the associated checkbox in the Write window.

The Simulate disc creation option, which will check whether your system is capable of recording with a given speed (all actions will be identical with those taken during actual recording, except that no data will be written to a CD). If you use this option, you'll have to perform the write process again, removing this option, to complete your audio CD.

The Write CD Text information option, which will write any available CD+Text information, for files in your playlist, to your new audio CD. If you didn't "read" this information from an existing audio CD, you may have to add it to our playlist by hand. To get more information on this feature of our software, click the help line below.

Using CD Text

The Enable BURN-Proof option, available only when using Plextor or Plextor-based CD burner drives, offers protection from recording errors at the expense of write speed. To learn more about the BURN-Proof solution, click the help line below.

Using BURN-Proof mode

To start recording your CD, press the Write button.