I have been given a very large music file on CD. It is actually a band's demo, but there are five songs all in one file. I would like to split this file into five chuncks.

The file has appears to have a RealPlayer icon and has the file suffix .cda

How can I split this into sections? What (hopefully free) software would I need to do it?

I have access to both a PC and a Mac - would prefer to use the Mac but either is OK.

Many thanks

I think that you are going to either get a converter to get it in another format, or play and record it with something like Audacity (http://audacity.sourceforge.net/download/) which can then be used to split the tracks.

The .cda file type is simply a cd audio track - you won't be able to copy it from the CD to your hard drive without ripping it (I always use CDEx (http://cdexos.sourceforge.net/) for this). You'll then be left with a large .mp3 file (or whatever you choose to rip it as) on your hard disk.

You'll then need something like Audacity (http://audacity.sourceforge.net/) which will let you split the file up into the separate tracks - there's a tutorial telling you how to do this on the website here (http://audacityteam.org/wiki/index.php?title=Splitting_recordings_into_separate _tracks).

Hope that helps,

As above, rip to 320kbps or minimum 192kbps LAME encoded MP3 and then split up with Audacity.

Rip it to a WAV file and edit that or you will lose quality.

If using 320kbps, you would actually need to be jesus to be able to tell the difference.

As hard disk space isn't at a premium nowdays, why not do it the right way? Plus all that encoding/rencoding takes up time etc.

If you really want to do it right, rip it to a wav, convert it to 24 bit, 96khz do your mastering/limiting/fading and dither it back to 16/44 wavs before making CDs & mp3s. But only my dad (God) would be able to tell.