I own the original cd’s of all the music involved. I’ve converted them to mp3’s over the years so that I can put them on my ipod and phone. What I want to do now is make some compilation cd’s of my music that can be played on any stereo or device that plays cd’s. I haven’t installed anything on this computer since i’ve built it, and am not sure what cd making programs are good right now, by which i mean relatively easy to use, and malware and virus free. Oh, and cost-free too. 
Can I get some recommendations?
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I think this thread will do better in IMHO where folks can give their opinions about different products instead of just listing them and can give personal experiences as well.
Moving thread from General Questions to In My Humble Opinion.
Don’t burn CDs from MP3s. Make new lossless copies from the original discs, and your mixes will sound better, on anything with real speakers.
iTunes.
If you have a Windows computer, you probably already have Windows Media Player installed, which can burn music CDs pretty easily.
The extent to which this is true will depend on the quality (bit rate, etc.) of the MP3 files. But yeah, if you care about sound quality and want the CDs you burn to sound as good as the originals, you can go back and re-rip the songs you want in lossless format before burning them.
You can burn the mp3 files onto the CD and some music players can play the mp3 files that way.
Otherwise you’ll have to convert the mp3 files back to wav files.
Since mp3 files are compressed they won’t sound as good as the original files. Therefore you have to rerip the cds into wav files.
Foobar and Cuetools will handle conversion and they’re free. DBPoweramp is excellent but isn’t free.
Since the OP said “cd’s of my music that can be played on any stereo or device that plays cd’s,” I assume he wants the latter. Most CD burning software (including Windows Media Player) will handle the necessary conversion automatically as long as you tell it you want to burn a music CD (as opposed to a data CD).
This. You import the mp3’s to iTunes, then add them to a playlist. You can then burn the playlist to an audio CD.
Thirded. It’s so simple, even I can do it.
If you don’t care to buy into the Apple garden, CD Burner XP is one of the most useful disc tools I’ve ever found. Images, CDs, DVDs, Blu-Rays, data, audio, video, combo… it does it all.
I second this. I’ve made .wav CDs out of mp3s using Windows Explorer and they play on any CD player. It’s the simplest way to do it.
Ya beat me to it. I use this program, and it does all I need. The interface is comfortably intuitive, so even schlubs like me can get it to work.
I also recommend Audacity, a lovely (free!) sound management program. You can import from mp3, and save in other formats. It also has some nice noise-reduction and click-removal features, which are good when you’re converting from old LPs.
I agree with thei recommendation: CD Burner XP is great for this. (Just like Win XP was great.)
But I’d also go back to the original CD’s, extract the songs as .wav files, and write from them to the new CD’s. Then, if you need the disk space, you can delete the .wav files.
[You might try running a test, comparing an original CD vs. an .mp3 condensed version of the same song, and see if you can hear the difference. For a lot of people (especially those over 40) their ears no longer hear the difference. In which case, just go with the .mpd files that you have.]
If you’re on Windows 7, just use Windows Media Player. I seem to remember some talk about the feature being removed in later versions of Windows, but I’d check anyways. (Though I also seem to remember that you had to download WMP separately on some versions of Windows. It’s still free, but it doesn’t come with them. CD Burner XP or some other limited program is probably better if you don’t have WMP or iTunes.)
Toast. Formerly by Adaptec, acquired by Roxio quite some time ago. Damn good product.
A lot depends on the quality of the MP3 files. Variable bit rate (VBR) or > 200 MBS are generally not noticeably inferior to the raw CD track AIFF (or WAV) file.
Thanks for all the suggestions. I did not know you could burn cd’s with iTunes, but I haven’t used the ipod since the screen cracked about a year and a half ago, and really don’t want to install itunes just to make a couple cd’s unless it was the simplest option.
I have Windows 10, and since a few of you suggested using Windows Media Player, I checked, and it is installed on my comp. So I made a couple of compilation cd’s for my friend from work. He is into both heavy metal and fantasy movies, so I just want him to hear some of the “heroic fantasy heavy metal” that I listen to, and if he’s into it, he can buy the cd’s for his own use, and support the bands. Not that concerned about making the highest quality sound available.
I am thinking about re-ripping my cd’s (over 450, of many different styles of music) at some point with the lossless format as a few suggested. I started making them into mp3’s about 15 years ago (damn, has it been that long?!), and I’m sure they’d sound much better now.
Umm, it has a different name (for some ungodly reason) for the Windows version.
Creator NXT 5, apparently. “Easy CD Creator” or some such thing back in the day. Don’t know why they didn’t go with “Toast”. It’s a better name.
I regularly rip cd’s on my new laptop running Windows 10. They play on all my players/cars.