How do I copy a CD onto my computer - Windows 7 - Dell XPS computer?

Thank you for ALL that information. I will go through it and see what I can do. He recorded the CD himself and it only has 6 songs on it. It just a standard blank CD. Thanks too for the pictures, that should help too!

usic can be stored on a CD in a number of different ways. A commercial music CD will have "tracks" that can only be played by software that is designed to read the information and convert it into sound. Windows Media Player is an example of such software. Read this short article for an explanation: https://fileinfo.com/extension/cda

In your original question, you wrote that the CD you have is not a commercial CD, but we don't know if the person who created the CD saved the information as encoded music or as more conventional files such as MP3 or WAV files.

PART 1 -- How Are The Files Saved On The CD

If the CD had been encoded so that it would play on a stand-alone CD player (which almost no one has anymore), you could have used Windows Media Player to "rip" the audio files from the CD. This process converts the music into MP3 files (or WAV files or WMA files, depending on the settings in Windows Media Player.

If the person who created the CD had saved the music as MP3 files, all you would have had to do would have been to copy the files from the CD to your computer. There would have been no need to "convert" anything and no need to use Windows Media Player.

So, in the hope of simplifying things, put the CD into your computer's CD player. If Windows Media Player opens and starts to play music, stop it, and close Windows Media Player. Now open Windows Explorer (the file manager) by pressing the "Windows Logo" key together with the "E" key. You should see something like this:

Note the icon of a CD with a note. This indicates that a music CD is in the drive. This is confirmed by the words "Audio CD" and the letters "CDFS" which stand for CD File System. Note that Windows reports that there are 0 bytes free of 0 bytes (total available). That's because the Windows file manager doesn't "understand" the CD File System.

If you were to right-click on the icon for this audio CD and select "Open" (rather than "Play"), you would see something like this (the article linked above explains what CDA means here):

On the other hand, the person who created the CD had saved the data as MP3 files rather than as audio files, you would probably see some folders and if you navigated down, you would see a bunch of mp3 or wav files.

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PART 2 -- Where Are The MP3 Files From The CD

If you successfully ripped an audio CD and converted to MP3 files using Windows Media Player, those files would have been saved in a subfolder under your "Music" folder. Just click Start, and then Music to open the Music folder:

If, on the other hand, you had copied MP3 files from the CD, they would be wherever you had saved them.

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Part 3 -- What To Do With The MP3 Files On Your Computer

At this point, forget about Windows Media Player and the playlist. You're not going to use it for the following steps.

Let's assume that you now have determined where the MP3 files are located. For example, here's a collection of MP3 files from a Johnny Cash album:

Click on the first file, press and hold the Shift key, and click on the last file to select all of the files, like this:

Notice that the bottom pane shows "18 items selected." Click on "Show more details" at the bottom:

The bottom pane now shows some interesting details. For example, if you played all 18 tracks, it would take 59 minutes and 15 seconds. What you're interested in now, however, is the total size of the collection. In this case, its 67.8 MB.

If the total size of the files that you have is more than about 25 MB, you will not be able to attach them all to a single email. In this case, you have some options.

"Compressing" the files is not an option for you. That's because MP3 files are already compressed and further compression will not result in a significantly smaller file.

Either send multiple emails, each of which has a few files attached such that the sum of the sizes is less than about 25 MB or upload the files to folder created on an online storage facility such as OneDrive or Google Drive, create a shareable link, and send the link in an email. The recipient can then use the link to download the files to her own computer.

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If you have questions about any of the above steps, let me know. Please make your questions as specific as you can.

I know how to share documents via e-mail and pictures on Facebook, but music seems to be a different beast. I can't figure out how to turn a media playlist item into an MP3.

Oh, this is easy.

Right click in a folder or on your Desktop and create a compressed folder. Then, select all items on your CD and copy them to the compressed (*.zip) folder. You may name this zipped folder whatever you like, besides a few names such as "con", "aux", "nul" and some others. E-mail the zip folder to whoever you are trying to email it to.

I got the CD uploaded onto my computer via Media Player, but I don't know how to share it. The artist gave me permission to share it to Facebook also, but I can't figure out how to that either. Is it something I can do?