The VideoLAN Forums

I have a CD of British bird calls, which was recently issued by the Independent newspaper. Each bird call is recorded in cda format, and when played from the CR disk each track opens and plays audio using my default VLC media player.

In order to learn the various bird calls I have copied specific tracks over to my hard disk. These open in VLC media player but do not run. Can anyone explain this?

Copying a track from an audio CD is just a pointer that is 44 or so bits long and is not the file.

Doh! I hadn't noticed that. Is there any way of copying tracks onto a hard disk?

VLC can do this for you in the transcode options. Use s16l in a wav container.

I'm afraid your reply means little to me. How do I do that? Is there an instruction file somewhere? I've looked at all the available menu options in VLC but see nothing about transcode, 161, or wav?

This menu for Stream output is available from any File Open menu except Quick Open. Under Advanced options select Stream/Save and then select Settings. This will open a menu called Stream output where you can specify your transcode options.

Sigh. You'd better give up on me. I found the advanced options, settings, and set WAV and s161. The VLC widow then proceded to loop endlessly until manually halted. It had produced a file of 0 which did not play.

Whilst very grateful for the time you have given me, surely there is a user manual somewhere for such an excellent utility?

Saving track 3 of a CD in my E: drive to a file z:\test.wav would look like this:

Success! Very much appreciated. Thank you.