allright so one of my friends left her Yellowcard cd in my car, and I was listening to it today and decided it was burnworthy.

now the cd mentioned above is an orignal store copy, that happens to be scratched to hell, and takes some loving to get it to play.

BUT for example the song "Only One" makes me speakers thump really hard when turned up decently, like moving the mirrors and thumping hard enough you can feel it on your back and chest while driving.

now...my first approach was to rip the cd using media player and then burn it using Nero...went out to the car, sounds fine...but the bass is gone, its just straight up weak.

so i checked my rip settings and they were set at 128kbps MP3, so i kicked it up to 320kbps, ripped it again, and did the process over again. took it out to the car...better..but still not as good

i also tried simply making a copy of the cd using Nero, but i ended up with a coaster, methinks this is because the original is so scratched.

so what im asking is how can you retain the quality of an original cd in burned form? ive never given it any thought, as the only burned cds ive made recently have come from music obtained elsewhere.

any compression is gonna be noticeable to some point...

if you burn a direct copy of a CD it will retain all its data, and sound exactly the same

ripping=quality loss

So what do you so? New at to. Save cd as file>then burn???

any good cd software will have a CD COPY option.. its automatic...

you need to have 2 seperate drives, a reader and writer

U don't have to have seperate drives.......mine just uploads then spits the cd out thet put another in.......pretty simple!

I do agree though that if u just make a straight up duplicate it sounds much better!!

ok HAVE was extreme... possible with 1 drive... but how long does it take?

i can do a full copy in like 3 min...

Takes a little longer.....about 6 to 7 min.

Yep. You need CloneCD, on of the SOnic/Roxio audio programs, or any of the probably hundreds of similar ones out there, to do a direct CD to CD copy.

And who doesn't have 2 CD capable drives these days? I have my Lightscribe DVD burner, which will play and burn CDs, as well as a CD Burner. Direct copies are incredibly fast. Just don't do anything else. Let the burner have the computer. Might not be neccessary, but it makes me feel better.

Oh yeah, invest in a cheap CD Cleaning/Repairing kit. You can get 'em for like 10 bucks at Target, WallyWorld, I've even seen 'em at the grocery store. The better the original, the beter the copy (garbage in, garbage out y'know)

I used Musicmatch to format my whole CD collection into MP3 so that I would have them all on my PC. I burn songs from them all the time and they sound just as good as the original.

Does your software allow you to tweak the EQ settings at all before you rip them?

EDIT: i just went into my Windows Media Player and saw these settings:

Also, I am assuming, since I have never used WMP to copy CD'* that you are using the Copy to device feature? if so it may be more or less used for MP3 Players instead of CD burners???? Correct me if im wrong. I never used WMP to burn, rip or copy anything.

Yeah, you did mention you used WMP to rip the CD. I've never used it for that, but with all the protection they have, that could be your problem too.....