Burning Questions / Burning Answers

Pumping Out Your Own CDs is No Sweat
If You Have a "Burning" Desire


Chances are, as you begin creating audio, you’re going to be burning some CDs. Whether its doing your own duplication, or doing a test market of a new product, or simply getting the audio of your latest dynamite talk to a meeting planner.

CD burning software often lets you choose between burning an Audio CD, MP3 CD or Data CD. And there’s a huge difference between them that you must know about if you want to avoid customer service headaches.

Audio CD

A CD burned in Audio CD format will play on just about any CD player. Audio CD format is limited to 70-80 minutes of music per CD. Which shouldn’t be an issue because going even 70 minutes can challenge today’s narrow attention spans.

You want to give your audience great information, not a doctoral degree. If you need to go longer than 60-70 minutes, deliver your program on several CDs, or provide a downloadable MP3 supplement.


MP3 CD Format

However, a CD burned in MP3 CD format will only play on newer model CD players that can handle MP3s as well. Rule of thumb: with any player over 2-3 years old, you’re playing with fire, because folks with legacy CD players won’t be able to play those CDs. And the majority of folks out there have these older players.

That doesn’t mean you can’t distribute your audio in MP3. It only means CDs burned in MP3 CD format probably won’t play on you customers’ CD player. (MP3s are best delivered as downloads and can be played on a computer or MP3 player, but that’s another story).

The upside of MP3 CD format is you can get a lot more audio on your CDs because MP3s are compressed, so they are much smaller in size.

To take this one step further . . .

You CAN burn MP3 format audio to a CD using Audio CD format. The burner will convert the files to Audio CD format on the fly during the burning process, so if you’ve saved your files in MP3 format, you don’t need to convert them before you burn them . (Just be sure you burn them in Audio CD format).

However, the 70-80 minute limit still applies to Audio CD format, even if the files you’re burning are MP3s.

What to Use

Since I’m on a Mac, I use a commercial program called Toast to burn my CDs. If you’re on a PC the premier products are:

• Nero
• Easy Media Creator

There are a bunch of free programs out there that allow you to burn audio CDs.

My favorite is Apple’s iTunes. Its available for Windows and Mac, and it will burn your CDs in Audio CD or MP3 CD format. The only thing you want to check is make sure iTunes supports your CD burner. If you have a newer model burner, it probably does.

Oh Yeah . . . Data CD

This one’s easy. It won’t play on ANY CD player. However, you can burn MP3s in data format, and people can drag the MP3s to their computer or transfer to their MP3 player and listen there.

The primary reason I burn an audio recording to Data CD format is if I’m getting the files to a professional duplication company, or to a client for them to create and duplicate their own CDs.

But if you’re looking to create a CD product that people can listen to on their CD players you’ll want to stay away from this one.