MYSTERY:a burned disc is it WAV or Mp3 (SOLVED #32)

[audiorapture]

I downloaded the "Audacity" and what a wealth of information and stuff to play with. Thanks "nick-charles, give a biscut to "Asta" for me and pour yourself another "highball").
I should start by writing the steps I take down as I proceed so when I mess up, I can go back to the part before that and start again. The tutorial is a little complicated for me, so this is going to take a little longer than I thought. I am going to keep the original cd that started the question as the first subject. If I get good at this, I might just try to copy "Dark Side of the Moon", but I can't imagine which version I could use.
"Monolith", thanks for the direction and I hope this works out the way I think it should.
Of course if I discover any secret codes along the way I will publish them with my notes. Even Windows needs an update. And I would be glad to share all of Bill Gates secrets........
Wait a minute, it's 2:25 a.m. here and there are three guys in my driveway getting out of a large black limo with tinted windows and the logo on the side that says "Microsoft". HOLD IT, my computer is shutting down! the lights have just gone out, and

[audiorapture]

No need to finish with :Audacity";
Step one (should have been to stay away from Microsoft WMP),
I went to Nero 7...and put in a disc...opened to favorites...then chose audio CD...chose the drive ...and cancelled the page "Neros title and data page...opened options...clicked on copy audio cd tracks...and THE page opens up ..."Save Tracks"... and lo and behold on the right side are the file extensions that say WAV !
Thanks to everyone who helped...

[ameyer17]

The file extension being .wav doesn't mean much.
The CD could still br mp3 sourced.

[nick_charles]

Originally Posted by audiorapture

No need to finish with :Audacity";
Step one (should have been to stay away from Microsoft WMP),
I went to Nero 7...and put in a disc...opened to favorites...then chose audio CD...chose the drive ...and cancelled the page "Neros title and data page...opened options...clicked on copy audio cd tracks...and THE page opens up ..."Save Tracks"... and lo and behold on the right side are the file extensions that say WAV !
Thanks to everyone who helped...

Sadly, You have not yet really established the substantive answer to your original query.

What you have estabished is that NERO will save the CD tracks as a set of WAV files, this does not actually tell you if they started life on the CD as WAV files since you cannot directly save CDA files to a hard drive for reasons that have been covered elsewhere. But, even assuming that the CD was simply made up of collection of WAV files you wanted to know if they themselves started life as MP3 files - so far you still do not know this...You can convert MP3 to WAV for burning to CD and you get all the lossiness of
MP3 plus the bloated file size of an uncompressed file.

Unless I have the wrong end of the stick on this ?

EDIT : must type faster