Need to copy music cds

[Grandpaw]

I want to try and make some slide shows with my pictures and add music in the background. A friend of mine loaned me some of the cd's he uses and I would like to make some copies so I can give them back to him. I have Vista and would like to get some free software that I can use until I have time to check this out further. Is there any available that will work on Vista? Jeff

[another view]

Are these slide shows for "personal use", versus for sale? Just thinking about copyright issues similar to what we run into with photography.

As far as how to do it, I'm probably not the best guy to ask. I have an Apple Macintosh and the software is different. I don't know for sure, but Apple's iTunes probably has a version (I used to use it with Windows XP). The software is free. Download and install it, and then when you insert a CD into the computer, with a couple of clicks you can import it into iTunes. The downside is it's not an mp3 file (which is the universal music file, as jpg is to photography). Not sure of your intended use but this may or may not be an issue. Hope someone else has a suggestion.

[Grandpaw]

This is for personal use only. I just wanted to try and put some of our vacation pictures together as a slide show and add some sound in the background so our family can watch them, Jeff

[Franglais]

... A friend of mine loaned me some of the cd's he uses and I would like to make some copies so I can give them back to him...

If these are commercial CD's then this is copyright enfringement. Your friend owns the CD's and you have no right to copy them or use the music

Assuming that these are not commercial CD's - put the CD into Vista and go into Windows Media Player there is an option "Extract" which allows you to copy the music onto your PC as individual wma files. You should be able to use these files in your slideshow.

Note that Vista is very finicky about copyright. You might find that any files you extract onto your PC are not readable on another device

p.s. I just tried combining a legally-downloaded wma file combined with a slideshow done on PICASA V3 freeware and I had no problem generating a WMV file and reading it on another Vista system. I didn't try the upload-to-Utube option but I think it would have worked. PICASA and Utube are part of Google. It's so easy - to enfringe copyright

[Grandpaw]

Just to clear up a point that seems to be the focus here, these are CD's he personally recorded, not commercial, and brought over to me and told me I could make a copy of for my use. Even if I never get around to making a slide show of my pictures with sound I would still like to be able to copy just plain cd's that I have made myself so my children will have copies of pictures on our vacation. I can burn the original Jeff

[another view]

these are CD's he personally recorded, not commercial

So he's the musician I take it. That's very cool!

The reason I bring it up, and probably the reason Charles brings it up is that the issue is very near and dear to the heart of a photographer. We all see the effect of cut-and-paste with unauthorized useage and know that it isn't right. However, it's such a normal thing for 99.9% of people that they don't realize or care that it's technically illegal. It really is the same thing as with music in this regard. When you buy a CD, you essentially own a piece of plastic, a booklet and rights to listen to it for personal use and make one copy for use on something like a portable player (iPod). You can't sell the CD at a garage sale and keep it on your iPod, technically. You also can't give it to your friend and make a copy.

Now I'll go out on a limb and say that if you follow this to the letter of the law 100% of the time you'll be in the vast minority of the population. And you're certainly doing nothing wrong since this is your friend's music.

I don't know how the law works in the case of a singer or band performing someone else's music, but for some reason it's either legal or at least accepted. I've been paid countless times to do just that over the years (never on a recording for commercial use, but have recorded "covers" on demo CD's). Whoever comes to listen to us paid to get in to hear us perform someone else's music. We walked away with money for doing it. Not sure on that one....

Sorry for beating the subject to death!

[opus]

it's also in the news right now somewhere; I saw a headline but didn't follow the link. Something about how people do exactly what you're doing, put music to a slideshow, and that they don't even think about the issue of copyright. Sometimes they post the slideshow online, or show it to a group of people (conference, etc), and nobody gives the music a second thought. But if it's a commercial recording, it's a no-no to do that.

[Franglais]

Just to clear up a point that seems to be the focus here, these are CD's he personally recorded, not commercial, and brought over to me and told me I could make a copy of for my use. Even if I never get around to making a slide show of my pictures with sound I would still like to be able to copy just plain cd's that I have made myself so my children will have copies of pictures on our vacation. I can burn the original Jeff

My Vista system doesn't seem to have a facility for duplicating CD's built-in. It will just make a CD from files on disk.

There was Roxio CD Creator 9 bundled with the computer when I bought it, which does CD copies. Check and see if yours has something similar. It worked fine for me and I've now gone on to the full version

When I need to share - for example after a wedding - I make CD's with full-definition images for the bride & groom and immediate family. For a wider population I put medium-definition (1600x1600) images on a photo sharing site (PICASA) and invite people to come and download. It's free and private.

[OldClicker]

To answer the question: If they are non-copy protected files, you copy them just like you would any other file to your hard drive or whatever. If you want to put them on a CD, you need CD-burning software. This software probably came with you computer if you have a read/write cd drive. - TF

[Grandpaw]

Thanks everyone for helping me out. The last computer I had had a copy program in it that was very quick and was much simpler to use. Thanks again for all the replies, Jeff