How to Create Audio CDs and DVDs

To play digital music files on your stereo system or in your car, you may need to burn them to a CD-R. All recent desktop computers include a CD writing drive, and while it is likely that CD burning capability is built into your operating system, using specialized software to do this can give you more control over the settings and sometimes better quality results.

Remember, if your files are in uncompressed WAV or AIFF format, writing them to an audio CD is merely a transfer of data. There is no loss of quality unlike recording to an audio cassette. However, if your files are in MP3 or some other compressed format, the file size will increase in the conversion to CD audio files, but the audio quality will not. It is best, therefore, to use uncompressed audio files.

Your CD burner may have dedicated software, such as Roxio Easy Media Creator or Nero, but you should also be able to use any software that plays music. ITunes works well for this purpose.

To begin, insert a blank CD-R in the appropriate drive, and start iTunes. The software may then open a dialog box with instructions on how to burn your CD and how to create a new playlist. If so, click OK. Select the playlist you want to burn to disc; the number of songs, the total time of the playlist, and the number of megabytes taken up by the audio files will be displayed under the track-listing window.

A CD can contain approximately 74 minutes of music, equivalent to 650MB of data. Some software may allow you to burn up to 700MB of data on a CD-R, but ordinary CD players may have trouble reading these discs. Also, don't be fooled, your MP3 files can be burned to disc, but unless otherwise specified they will be converted to CD audio format. 74 minutes of music will fill an entire disc even if your source files are much smaller.

It is worth noting, however, that many of the latest CD players are capable of playing CD-Rs containing MP3 data, that is, MP3 files that have not been converted to CD audio. You will need to check the documentation for your CD player to find out if this is possible; if so; it will allow you to burn as many MP3 encoded songs as you can fit onto a 650MB disc.

Choose Edit > Preferences from the top menu, then choose the Burning sub-tab under the Advanced tab. Your preferred speed should always be set to Maximum Possible unless your drive is one of the older, error prone models. Then, you can choose between an Audio CD, which will play on any CD player; an MP3 CD, which will only play on computer drives or on consumer drives that explicitly feature that capability; or, a Data CD, that like the MP3 CD merely copies data byte for byte to the CD without converting it to CD audio format. Data CDs containing uncompressed files will play on computers, but not on anything else, so do not use this setting unless you are creating a backup copy of your music files.

If you are burning an Audio CD, you may want to insert gaps of silence between tracks, but this is generally not necessary. Enabling Sound Check will cause iTunes to adjust the volume of all your files to about the same level. You might have done this already during the normalization process, but if not, you may want to check this box. This may have undesirable consequences in that pieces of intentionally quieter music may suddenly become louder when burned to CD, so beware you can only record to a CD-R once. Once you are satisfied with your settings, click OK.

Ensure that the little box to the left of each of the tracks you want to burn from your selected playlist is checked, and make sure all the checked songs are in the correct order; then, click Sum Disc in the upper right corner. ITunes will display a progress indicator with the track currently being burned and the estimated time remaining until the CD is ready. If the amount of music exceeds the amount of space on one disc, iTunes will automatically ask you to insert another CD-R. Remember: if you cancel the process or eject the disc in mid progress, your disc will no longer be of much use to anyone, except perhaps as a drink coaster.

If you have a drive that supports writing to DVD, the procedure for burning to a DVD-R disc is the same as it is for a CD-R, except that you will have a whopping 4.7GB of space and the ability to fit about five times as many songs on one disc! Note that many consumer drives will not recognize rewritable media such as CD-RW, DVD-RW and DVD+RW discs, though your computer probably will.

Also note that as the DVD format war rages on, most DVD writing drives will label themselves as "DVD±RW compatible", this simply means that they can write to both DVD-RW ("dash") and DVD+RW ("plus") media. The main difference between the two formats is that while DVD-RW must be written to in one sweep, like a CD-RW, you can write bits of data to DVD+RW discs in the same way as you would a regular hard drive. However, DVD+RW media tends to be more expensive.