I have been using windows media player to copy songs of my CD's on to my hard drive- butwhen i try to burn them on to a cd using nero it comes up with the message cannot copy this is not a recognised format- Is there any software i can download which will copy songs off CD's onto my hard drive and keep them in true mp3 format. Any help would b truly gratefull:mad:

Windows Explorer.

Not really sure what is happening but when you use Media Player to copy your files, are they being copied or coverted to the WMA format?

Also, when using Nero to burn, are you just trying to burn the mp3's as data files or are you trying to burn an audio CD?

You can get Musicmatch Jukebox. It rips tracks for you. So does dbpowerAMP. Both of them have free versions out there.

Err, I just paste what I wrote in the post below this one. :rolleyes:
My favourite: www.cdex.n3.net
Another exellent one: www.dbpoweramp.com
This is probably the best, but it has (too?) many options. Very good if the disc is scratched. www.exactaudiocopy.de
All of these are free. Cdex comes bundled with the latest Lame mp3 encoder and a decoder for the format Ogg vorbis, which also is good, but only use that for files you are not going to burn to CD.

There's two approaches you can take:

1) Use a different ripper as suggested in the replies received - dbpoweramp, cdex or EAC are all excellent... Mp3Workshop worth a look too...

2) Get the WMA plug in for Nero and continue ripping the way you already are. Nero, without the plug-in, will not recognise WMA files/format, so that's your original problem. WMA plug in free at www.nero.com .

One thing that stroke my mind: If you are going to burn those files to an audio cd right away, you can store the files as wave files. This is the proper way to do it if you have the space on your HD, you get no sound quality loss. When ripping to mp3 or wma first, you get lower quality sound, and the ripping takes longer time. Prepare to use 800 mb on your HD for a cd with 80 minutes of audio. (Roughly 10 Mb per minute of music)