CD Burning Tutorial

For some years now, new computers have almost all come fitted with CD Writer drives and will come bundled with some suitable software.
Chances are yours came with Nero or Roxio, but they all do the same job and will be fine for the job.

    

This step-by-step is based on Nero, but it won't be far different on any other software.

First of all, you should use CDR (ie write-once) disks and not CDRW (write-many-times-disks). There are several reasons for this;
they're cheaper
they write faster
they're compatible with audio cd players
they're much less tempramental to write to.

The first question your software is going to ask you is what type of CD you want to make. If you want to play the CD on your audio CD player, you must choose "audio CD".


When you make this choice, whatever music file format you choose will be converted to .cda - for wav files this is hardly any different, but for any of the compressed file formats like mp3, ogg, wma, there's a lot of re-coding to do so the process will be slower. For this reason, save your recorded files to wav in the first place, if you're going to make audio CDs from them. You should be able to fit around 20 tracks onto a regular 80 minute CD - more if they're short.

Its important to note that if you want to make an mp3 CD to put in an mp3 CD unit (quite common in cars now) you must choose "CD-ROM" or "DATA CD" so that the files stay in their current format as they burn to the disk.

Sometimes you'll find that audio CDs you make will be jumpy when you play them back. This is normally caused by burning the disk too fast, because while in theory they can burn at 40x or 52x, its more reliable to drop to a slower speed, try 24x first which will still only take about 3 mins to burn a full CD.