I've just bought a "set" of audio CDs but since the entire "book" is spread over 6 CDs, I want to extract the audio files to my computer so that I can play the entire "book" without having to swap CDs. However, when I open the CD via My Computer, it only shows 1KB files.

You will have to rip the audio from the CD to WAV files or MP3s or some other format to do what you want. Windows Media Player can rip them to WMA files for you. Foobar can rip a CD too.

Foobar

Ripping audio... sounds painful... I'm using VLC, will that work?

I discovered only recently that there are other options to rip to in Media Player such as MP3 and WAV. It just defaults to WMA.

Great, I've ripped my CDs out with WMP. Now if I could only set it up to name the files better...

The important thing is to get the tags right. That's what a Zune or an iPod need to see what the file is, not the name of the file. I use Tag and Rename, but there are some free ones.

http://www.mp3tag.de/en/

If you are doing a lot of ripping, nothing can beat dbpoweramp. It's not free though. It does it all including batch ripping and tagging.

http://www.dbpoweramp.com/

Wow, Ice, you've never ripped audio off a CD before now?

I think I have, but that was years and years ago, when I was a teenager. This time it's different since I'm loading them onto my iPod so obviously the naming/info has to be right so that they will play in proper order. No problem for just one CD, but I'm talking about 5 CDs here for one "playlist"... two playlists with multiple CDs per playlist and my head hurts just thinking about it. Oh, and it's a cheap iPod, the one with just the play/pause/forward/back button, so if you have to skip one CD, that's a lot of forward-presses!