Copying(Ripping) audio cd's with windows media player in windows 10

I was cleaning around and found some old audio cd's I've had for a long time. Unfortunately some of them are a bit scratched so I wanted to save those that are not by copying them to the computer. Windows media player will now let you do this. The files will be in the wma format so just be aware of this.

 Here's the cd inserted in the the drive selected. Right above that you will see the option to rip. Just hit that and let it copy the sogs. You don't need to do anything else.

 Once the files have been copied you can just go to your albums and find it there.

 Once you have the cd selected, you can right click on the large icon and go to open file location. You will have to have open the album first or the option won't show up.

Here I checked the file extension to show you what type of file this will be.

 Now, I put the cd back in to rip as mp3 instead of wave and of course the windows media player wouldn't let me do it now. The cd icon is grayed out. In any case you have the other options under the menu to rip as an mp3 if you want instead of the wma format which should play on almost anything.

 Here are the rest of the options. I later found out that if you just check the boxes next to the names, the rip cd option will come back from the grayed non clickable side.

 Since windows gets to picky and very restrictive with this sort of thing. You can always use a different program to do this. In this case I used starburn to make my mp3 files. You can use whatever program you like, this is just what I'm using here.

 Now I can go back and make the choice I want and copy the cd. The media player is convenient if you know exactly what you want before using it. I had not used it so I just let it do it and that's how I found that I couldn't go back and re-do that as an mp3 again.

 I just left this at the default.

 And this as well. Then hit next and the ripping begins. This should be pretty easy nowadays, but as long as you know how picky windows can be then you can still use it. I don't do this at all so I wanted to compare the file sizes and this is why I wanted to go back and do that before. It is what it is, so I hope this helps a bit. Unfortunately doing it this way won't grab the names and you only get track 1, 2, etc. Not very helpful when the cd is in another language.

In short, now that I had the chance to compare both wma and mp3 files, the mp3 files are just a tad smaller than the wma. Both are about the same size though but at least you should be able to play the mp3s in most players. Personally I prefer the smaller size files for almost anything as things can just get way to large nowadays. I do have to say I like using the windows player as it keeps all the names and files in order even with other languages, so there's nothing to go back and edit after ripping which is nice.