MP3 CD Burner

Burning your own music CD isn’t a trouble now. MP3 CD Burner is a software tool that helps you create normal audio CDs from your favourite MP3, WMA, WAV, OGG, APE, AAC and MP4 files. You can then play them in your regular home stereo or car CD player.

Audio CD or MP3 data disc?

When you burn music to a blank CD there are two common kinds of disc, and it helps to know which one you actually want. A standard audio CD — the same CD-DA format as a shop-bought album — holds roughly 74–80 minutes of music and plays in practically any CD player ever made: home hi-fi, an older boombox, or the deck in your car. An MP3 data disc instead copies the song files onto the disc as they are, so one disc can carry several hours of music, but it only plays on equipment that lists MP3 (or “MP3 CD”) support.

MP3 CD Burner makes the first kind — a normal audio CD — so the result works even in older players that can’t read MP3 files. If your player does support MP3 discs, you can keep the tracks as MP3s instead and fit far more of them on a single disc.

Which blank disc should I use?

For an audio CD, use a plain CD-R. CD-Rs are write-once, inexpensive and readable in virtually every CD player, including older car decks. A CD-RW can be erased and reused, which is handy for testing a track list, but many ordinary audio CD players — especially older ones — cannot read rewritable discs, so a mix that plays fine on your computer may stay silent in the car. Standard blanks hold about 74 minutes (650 MB) or 80 minutes (700 MB) of audio; if a playlist runs longer than that, split it across two discs.

Getting a burned disc to play everywhere

Almost every “it plays on the computer but not in the car” complaint comes down to one of these:

• Close (finalise) the disc. A standalone player reads the disc’s table of contents, and that table is only written when the disc is closed. Leave it open and the deck reports a blank or unreadable disc even though the audio is sitting on it.
• Burn at a moderate speed. Running a cheap blank at the drive’s maximum speed is a classic cause of clicks, skips and outright read failures in older players. Dropping a few steps costs a couple of minutes and usually gives a cleaner disc.
• Use CD-R, not CD-RW. Rewritable discs reflect less light, which a computer drive copes with and an ordinary audio deck often does not.
• Expect the two-second gaps. A standard audio CD normally leaves about two seconds of silence between tracks, so a burned copy of a continuous live album or a beat-matched mix can gain small pauses the original didn’t have.
• Keep discs out of heat and sunlight. A CD-R stores its data in an organic dye layer that fades with light and heat far faster than the pressed metal of a shop-bought album — a disc left on a dashboard can turn unreadable.

Don’t limit your music to your computer — burn it to CDs and listen anywhere, any time. Starting from a stack of CDs rather than loose files? Use Easy CD Ripper to extract the tracks first, then burn them back to a fresh disc.