A Quick Guide to Burning Lossless Audio Files to CD Using Nero

This blog provides links to out-of-print albums converted into lossless audio flies, usually in either Free Lossless Audio Codec (FLAC), Monkey’s Audio (APE) or WavPack (WV)formats and then further archived into multi-part WinRAR (RAR) files.

The purpose of this guide is to demonstrate how easy it is to download these files and then use Nero to create standard Audio CDs for your listening pleasure with just a little preparation.

There is other free software available that will burn these files to CD and supposedly do it better, but Nero is what comes bundled with most CD burners and like me most casual users are happy to stick with Nero.

If you are experienced in creating Audio CDs then some of these steps will be obvious to you, but I have written this guide from the perspective of a relatively new user. Hopefully it will help people avoid some of the frustrations I experienced the first time I tackled this process.

Setup:

If you don’t have them already, you will need the following additional software on your computer:

WinRAR – an archive program similar to WinZip that can be downloaded for free from here.

WinRAR will open ZIP files, but WinZip will not open RAR files (as far as I know).

Audio Codecs – files that tell Nero how to handle FLAC and APE files that can be downloaded for free from here and the file to handle WV (WavPack) can be downloaded from here.

Once downloaded, the Codecs need to be placed in the “Audio Plugins” folder for your version of Nero.

For Nero 5, the path is Program Files > Ahead > Shared > AudioPlugins

For Nero 6 & 7, the path is Program Files > Common Files > Ahead > AudioPlugins

Creating your CD:

1. Because of their size, the albums will have been archived into multi-part WinRAR (RAR) files. The first step is to download ALL the parts of the file by pasting the links in the post into your browser in turn and then following the download instructions.

2. After you have downloaded all parts of the file to your hard drive, double-click on Part 1 with WinRAR to extract the contents. This process should automatically extract the contents of all the parts at once.

3. You should now have on your hard drive a folder that contains the artwork for the album (when it is available) and 2 other files:

The first will be a large file with the extension *.flac or *.ape or *.wv. This is the album in lossless audio as one single continuous file. If you burn this file to a disc it will be exactly that – the album in a lossless audio format as one single continuous file, and not a standard Audio CD.

The second will be a smaller file with the extension *.cue. This is the CUE file or Cue Sheet – a text file that contains information about the album, usually the name of the performer, the title of the album and the title of the individual tracks. Most importantly, it will contain the times where the individual tracks start and finish, and where the gaps between songs are.

It is the CUE file you use to create a standard Audio CD in Nero.

4. Open Nero and select the “Burn Image” option. Use the “Add” function to select the CUE file and then select “Burn”. If everything has been set up correctly you will soon have a great sounding Audio CD with individual tracks.

Note:

In some cases, you may need to edit the CUE file - for example if the file extension listed in the CUE file doesn’t match the actual file or if the CUE file contains a file path for the FLAC/APE file.

To view the contents of the CUE file, select the file with a right-click of the mouse, then select "Open With" and choose Notepad.

Example 1 - if the file is called "album.flac" but the CUE file lists it as "album.wav" you will need to edit the CUE file (or alternatively convert the file from FLAC format to WAV format).

Example 2 - if the CUE file lists a file path something like "C:\folder\album.ape" you need to remove the "C:\folder\" part.

In both examples, simply right-click on the CUE file and then open it using Notepad or Wordpad and make the appropriate edits then save the changes.