Creating your own CDs
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With Windows Media Player, you can create (burn) your own CDs from the tracks you have stored in Media Library. Live streams, such as radio stations, cannot be copied to CDs.
To create a CD, you must have a CD recorder (burner) and blank CDs to which you can copy tracks.
Types of blank CDs
You can copy tracks either to a compact disc-recordable (CD-R) or a compact-disc rewritable (CD-RW). With CD-Rs, you can copy tracks only once, but play them by using any CD player. With CD-RWs, you can copy tracks many times, but typically you can play them only by using a CD-ROM drive. If you want to copy tracks to a previously used CD-RW, you must use another program or My Computer to erase the disc before you can use the Player to copy tracks to the CD again.
Note
The playlist or list of tracks that you select to copy cannot be more than the CD-R time limit. The phrase Will not fit is displayed in the Status column for a track even if you have exactly 74 or 80 minutes of audio selected because the Player inserts seconds (spaces) between the tracks. Tracks marked Will not fit are not copied to the CD.
File types
You can copy the following file types from the Player to a blank CD:
| • | Windows Media files with a .wma extension |
| • | .mp3 files |
| • | .wav files |
CD copy process
When a track is copied to a CD, the Status column in the Music to Copy pane displays the following information for each track. The CD burning process includes the following steps:
| • | Opening. The Player inspects the selected tracks for errors. |
| • | Converting/Converted (includes the percentage of conversion done). Each file is converted to the selected quality level or compression rate and stored in a temporary location on your computer. Each file is converted before copying begins. |
| • | Copying to CD (includes the percentage of copy done). Each file is copied. |
| • | Complete. The CD is not finished until Complete is displayed in the Status column for each track. When the last track is copied, Closing disc is displayed briefly for the last track. |
Note
When you insert the CD you created, information about the track, such as the album name, artist, or genre is displayed only on the computer that you used to create the CD.
The compression quality that you use to copy CD tracks to your computer affects the sound quality of the track, but does not affect the length of the track when copying from your computer to a CD. The better the sound quality you use to copy a track to your computer, the better the sound quality when you copy it from your computer to another CD. If you use the best quality sound to copy a track to your computer, more disk space is used on your computer. Other variables such as the speed of your CD-ROM drive can also affect the quality of the copy.
This section covers:
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