First came audiocassettes, and everyone was excited about making mix tapes for their car. Now with the advent of CD burners, it's a whole new ball game. Okay, with the coming and going of Napster, we don't have the luxury of making CDs with whatever music we want, but there are still plenty of MP3s available on the Internet.
So learn what all the hype is about and find out how to burn CDs for your listening pleasure.
getting started
First off, the term "burning" implies that you are taking data from your hard drive and saving it onto a CD-ROM.
Purchase a CD burner (otherwise known as a CD-R Drive). This may be stating the obvious, but not all computers come with one. If you do not already own a CD-R drive, you must have this hardware in order to create your own music CD.
These devices come in a variety of brand names such as HP, Sony and Yamaha. They also come in a variety of speeds; the quicker the writing speed (the speed at which information is copied to the actual CD), the more expensive the hardware.
mp3 to cd
Here are the steps involved in making an audio CD from MP3s downloaded from the Internet.
1- Download your favorite music
In order to create your own CD, you must first have the music. Therefore, you must download the audio file in MP3 format. This can be done using several different tools, Napster being the most popular of the bunch (which may be more difficult now).
2- Convert your MP3 into WAV file
This is the most important step because if you don't convert your files from MP3 to WAV, you will not be able to hear the CD in a conventional CD player.
This involves simply changing the format of the audio file from MP3 format to WAV format. In order to do this, you will most probably need to download a free program that will complete the task for you. Some of the more popular programs that can do this are MusicMatch Jukebox and WinAmp.
In order to efficiently complete this step, you're best off creating a temporary folder on your hard drive in which to store the converted WAV files. This is done for two reasons:
-- To easily locate the files you have converted once you are ready to actually burn them onto your CD-ROM;
-- It makes it easy to delete the files once you're all done, which you will want to do as WAV files can be quite large (usually 6-8 times bigger than MP3 files), taking up a lot of hard drive space.
3- Burn baby, burn
Once all the songs you want to place on your CD are converted into WAV format, open your burning software that comes with your CD-R device and locate the songs you have converted and placed in your temporary folder. Then, allow the software to guide you through the final steps.
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