Cool Edit Pro: Why can't Cool Edit Pro open the .cda files on my audio CD?

Cool Edit Pro can not open audio tracks on a CD (.cda). The .cda files that you see on an audio CD are simply pointers to tell the computer where on the CD the tracks begin and end, and are not files that contain digital audio themselves. You can see this by highlighting one of the .cda files: you will see that it is only 44 bytes, which is too small to hold audio data. The music/audio on your audio CD is digital, but not in a format that the computer can read. Cool Edit can only open audio files that are in a standard computer format such as .wav.

Loading the audio from a CD on to your hard drive requires Digital Audio Extraction, which Cool Edit does not do. The only way Cool Edit can access the audio on the CD is by recording the CD while it is playing back through your sound card. We have another FAQ that describes how to record from your CD into Cool Edit.

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