Maybe you really like the playlist you made for your road trip last year, and now you want to send it to your sister for her cross-country drive? Or you love the songs you bought on iTunes but want to play them in your car CD player? You're in luck! iTunes comes packed with the capability to burn CDs—provided, of course, that your computer is equipped with a CD burner.
iTunes uses the playlist as its main interface for CD burning. You'll notice that whenever you click a list, the big icon in the top right of iTunes changes to the Burn Disc option—a good example of efficient design. iTunes doesn't need another interface for making lists of tracks to burn.
The main choice you need to make, aside from what to put on your CD, is whether it will be an MP3 CD, data CD, or audio CD. Audio CDs play in all standard CD players, and some CD players can handle MP3s these days, but so far few can play AAC files. If you have a list of AAC files and choose MP3 as the disc type, iTunes will convert those songs. The big advantage of MP3 and data CDs is that they will hold a lot more songs than a standard audio CD because they're compressed.
- Before you burn your disc, set your preferences. Click Edit | Preferences and then click the Burning tab in the dialog box. This will list your CD burner if it was correctly detected by iTunes. Choose the preferred speed for burning—Maximum Possible is usually best. Choose your Disc Format.
- If you choose Audio CD, iTunes lets you pick how much time you want between songs (two seconds is the default and you'll probably want to stick pretty close to this).
- Choose a playlist that you want to burn. If you're burning an audio CD, make sure the total time is less than 70 minutes, or you'll have to split your song over two or more discs.
- Check Use Sound Check if you'd like to keep the sound level of all songs relatively equal. This will prevent any nerve-wracking jumps in volume. Close Preferences.
- Click the Burn Disc icon in the top right. It will quickly morph into an eerie, radioactive warning. (Why? Who knows?)
- iTunes will ask you to insert a blank disc. Do it.
If the disc is acceptably blank, iTunes will ask you to click Burn Disc once again to begin burning. When you do, the radioactive sign will begin to pulsate. It looks dangerous, but it's not.
