I have windows media player 11 and in the options menu for ripping a cd it has the wav(lossless)format option. however when i go into the burn menu it doesn't give much info on how the file is burned. If it is compressed or transfered as lossless. I do end up with a .cda file on the disk but i am not familiar if that is a lossless format or if it has been compressed. anyone know? On another older computer I had sony sonicstage and though it was never like much it did have a easy to use rip/burn section. It would let you pic the rip format and the burn format very simply. I have also tried MediaJukebox but don't care for it. Maybe i should just try itunes?

Try putting the burned disc in a regular CD player. It if shows up as a music CD then you've burned it losslessly. The .CDA may just be an abstraction showing you individual CD Audio tracks as files--there aren't really files on audio CDs.

I don't think that you can change the format or bit rate of a file when you burn a CD. In other words, what ever format or bit rate the file was ripped at is what it will be when you burn it to a CD. In order to have it be a lossless format, it would have to have been ripped that way to start with. Of course, if you are burning directly from a CD, you will just get an exact copy of the original.

Anyway, I believe that is the way it works. If I'm wrong someone please correct me.

Some burning software will make CD audio discs from MP3s on the fly. That does involve a format change.

But if the CD was originally ripped using Windows Media Player's Lossless WAV settings, the wave files will be 44.1kHz/16-bit the same as CD audio. There will be no loss if those files are used to create a new CD.

My suggestion was to try to figure out if the .wav files were burned to a data CD, or if they were formed into a proper audio CD.