I’ve never done this. I am positive that my laptop burns CDs, but do I generally need a special software to duplicate CDs? Do I first upload the music CD to my hard drive and then download it to a blank disk? Please advise (using elemental terms- I will not be offended by simplicity).
It really depends on the software you’re using. The drive that I have was bundled with a program called “Record Now!” which allows me to do three things:
- Back up data from my hard drive to a CD-R
- Write a music CD (from music files on the computer, like MP3, WAV, etc)
- Made a duplicate copy of another CD
It’s all pretty self-explanatory. The key, though, is to have software to accomplish the task. The drive by itself is not enough. One popular program I know of is called Nero, but there are many others out there as well if you don’t already have one that came with the drive.
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Windows Media also comes with burning software. Don’t have it on my work computer so can’t tell you exactly what it says, but it is pretty straightforward.
Hmmm, on second thought I can only gaurentee this is true if your running XP, so this may be a damn useless post.
I wouldn’t use Windows Media Player for burning CDs. IIRC, there’s some built in limitation that prevents you from making perfect duplicates. You have to do some sophisticated configuring to get WMP to do high quality copies.
I recommend Nero. It comes with wizards to guide you through the process step by step. Or if you prefer to do it yourself, select “Audio CD” and add the tracks you want one at a time. The panel on the right is your system (it’s set up like an Explorer window) and the panel on the left is the compilation. Drag desired songs from right to left to add them. There’s a bar at the bottom to tell you how much space you’ve got left on the CD. Once it’s full or you’re happy with the compilation, press the “Burn” button and Nero will do the rest. Once the program says it’s done, you just have to chose whether or not to keep the logfile of the operation (I don’t bother keeping it). When you’ve decided on that, the program will eject your freshly burnt CD, which should be compatible in pretty much any CD player.
Nero is probably your best bet, if you have it.
If not then you could download Real Player, which will do it ok but slowly (about 4x) but in a fairly compatible format, unlike WMP which doesn’t even recognise it’s own files half the time.
Instructions are all right in front of you, copy a cd, burn a cd, etc, etc.
Go to Apple’s web site and get iTunes. Not only is it a cool jukebox program, but burning music CDs is trivially easy:
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Insert blank CD-R/CD-RW. Wait for it to appear in the left-hand bar.
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Drag music tracks to blank CD-R/CD-RW.
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Arrange tracks in whatever order you want.
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Click the “Burn” button in the upper-right corner.
If you have an existing CD and you want to get (“rip”) the music off of it into your computer, it’s even easier: -
Insert music CD. Wait for it to appear in the left-hand bar. Wait for the CD’s track information to be retrieved from the internet.
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Uncheck any tracks you don’t want to rip.
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Click the “Rip” button in the upper-right corner.
Just burning your MP3s to a disc won’t give you a “Music CD”. It will give you a data CD with a bunch of MP3s on it. Some newer CD players will be able to read and play this, in which case you’re in luck, but I’ll assume that’s not what you’re asking for.
You’ll need some software that will convert whatever files you want to burn into the proper format to be readable in a CD player. Nero, Easy CD Creator, CloneCD, the list is pretty long. If you have a drive capable of burning CDs it probably came with software- they usually do.
Can you (or anyone) expand on this? I’ve always used WMP for burning CDs and been quite satisfied with it. I realize that, when I rip a CD, I may (or may not) lose some fidelity depending on the file type and bit rate I’ve chosen. Is there something more than this that’s going on?
Once you learn, tell me! I feel like I missed the landing of the computer literate!
Media Player does annoying things, like assigning copy-protect by default, that kind of thing. Basically, there’s so many better (free) programs out there, there’s no reason whatsoever to use WMP. I’ve never had a problem with Nero, other than when I want to burn a file other than MP3, WMP or WAV…then I use DB programs to convert the files.
There are a lot of answers here already. To narrow things down for you, it would help to know (in order of importance)
-Your OS
-What burning software (if any) you posess
-What kind of audio files do you have. (ogg, mp3, wmv, wma, ram, etc)
Assuming you have Win XP, you can (as has been said already), use Media Player to burn audio CDs. Take a look at this MS article for the specific steps.