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How To Burn To A CD
Here's a quick tutorial on how to burn the music you download from etree.org onto CDs. The basic steps involved are:
- Download
- Listen (optional)
- Uncompress
- Burn
I won't cover HowToDownload here.
Listening to the music is easy. Just open a folder of Flacs with your
Flac-enabled music player of choice (e.g. WinAmp, jRiver Media Center)
and listen to it.
Uncompressing is the first big step. You need to take the Flac files an
turn them into WAV files which you can burn. If you are using Microsoft
Windows, the easiest tool for doing this is FlacFrontend (see SoftwareYouNeed).
You can just drop a folder of Flacs onto the FlacFrontend window and it will
check them and then uncompress them to your default extraction folder.
Now you can start your CD burning application, and select the option
for burning an audio CD. The most important thing you need to remember
is that you want to burn all of your WheelToTheStorm files in disk-at-once
(DAO) mode. If you do not burn in DAO mode, your CDs will have 2
seconds of silence between each track, which is at best annoying when
the music should flow together from track to track. Lets review how you
do this with various applications.
- This is a very simple app, but great for burning audio CDs
quickly and easily. Start the app, and click the "Record Disc" icon in
the upper left of the toolbox. Click the "Load Tracks" button in the
"Record Disc" window. Ensure the Disc Type is Audio and Track Pregap is
set to 0 seconds. Click the "Add" button and find your WAV files, and
select them.
- Note that there is an annoying bug in the "Select Track File"
dialog box. Depending on how you select multiple files, they may appear
in the wrong order when you click "Open". Make sure that the tracks are
shown in the proper order in the "Load Tracks" dialog after you select
them. If not, you can drag them around in this view until they are
properly sorted (e.g. track 1, 2, 3, ...)
- Now just click the "Start Recording" button and you're done.
If you get a warning that the CD is over 74 minutes, be sure you have
an 80 minute CD in your recorder and click OK or double check that you
haven't added more than one discs worth of WAV files to your track list.
- Feurio has a slightly quirky user interface but it may be the
single best audio CD burning application available. If it supports your
burner, you would be well advised to give it a try. By the way, if you
use an illegal copy of this program, it will randomly insert beeps and
a nice copyright message into some of the audio cds you burn. You get
what you pay for, literally.
- Once you've got it setup and working, follow these steps to burn a flawless disc every time.
- Start the Feurio! CD-Manager application. If this is your
first time through, you will need to click the "New" button on the
"Project Selection" pane. In the "Create New Project" dialog, enter an
Artist and Title (these are required even if you're not burning a
CD-TEXT CD). Select "Do not insert pauses between tracks - round track
markers" for the "Pause between tracks" radio group and click "OK".
- Now you can click the "Add wave files to project" button in
the top pane and select your WAV files in the resulting file chooser.
In the "Add files to project" dialog box, set the "Mode" radio group to
"Reference". The "Source" setting doesn't matter. Click the "Add files"
button.
- You should now see the project in the top pane and all the
individual tracks at the bottom. In the bottom pane the "Index 0"
column should show "00:02.000" for the first track and be blank for the
rest of the tracks. This indicates you have setup the CD properly for
DAO burning and you should now just click the "Burn" button in the top
pane.
- This will bring up the Feurio! CD Writer dialog. Select
"Write" for the "Action" (you might want to try a "Test, write if
successful" your first time through) and click the "Burn CD" (or "Test
& Burn") button.
- When the time comes to burn subsequent discs, you can select
all the tracks from your first CD in the bottom pane of the CD Manager
and click the "Delete" button. You probably want to check the "Delete
files when EXTERNAL files" check box and then click "Delete". This will
remove the WAV files which you've just burned to a CD. Now you can add
new WAV files to your project and repeat until you're done.
- If you exit Feurio, the next time you start it remembers your
last project setup, so you don't need to create a new project each
time. You can just keep deleting the WAV files from the old project and
adding new ones, perhaps changing the Artist and Title in the Project
if you are burning with CD-TEXT enabled.
- From the "New Compilation" dialog which appears at startup or
from the File -> New menu, select "Audio-CD". You can optionally
enable CD-Text if your burner supports it, and click the "New" button.
Find your WAV files in the File Browser window and drag them to the
"Audio1" window on the left side of the screen.
- Now comes the annoying part. Select all the tracks on the left
side of the screen, right-click and select "Properties". In the
resulting Properties dialog, change the "Pause" from 2 to 0. You need to do this with every audio CD in Nero if you want DAO. Its very easy to forget to do this, which makes Nero unsuitable for burning DAO audio CDs in my opinion.
- Now you should be able to burn your CD by clicking on the little flaming CD icon at the top of the window.
- Be sure the grab the flac and shn plugins at [http://neroplugins.cd-rw.org/]. With these plugins you don't have to decompress the files before you burn them to disc....
- This method may be for the more advanced user but is IMO the
easiest way to burn a dir of .wavs. Did I mention that this method is
completely free and all software is GPL'd?
- First, download that software in the link and unzip it in your
c:\ dir. You can of course unzip it anywhere you want, but these
directions will assume you've unzipped them there. Rename the unzipped
directory to c:\cdrtools
- Next, you'll need to figure out the physical location of your
CD Recorder in order to create the burning script. You can do this by
opening a command prompt, changing directories to c:\cdrtools, and then
running this command: cdrecord -scanbus
- You'll get an output somewhere that looks like this:
- scsibus1:
- 1,0,0 100) 'PIONEER ' 'DVD-ROM DVD-106 ' '1.14' Removable CD-ROM
- 1,1,0 101) 'LITE-ON ' 'LTR-16102B ' 'OS09' Removable CD-ROM
- I already know my CD Recorder is my LITE-ON, so I'll
look to the far left of that entry and write down the 1,1,0. That is
the physical location of the CD Recorded needed later by cdrecord to
burn your wavs.
- OK...now you know the physical location of your recorder and
have the software almost in place. Next, you'll want to create a dir
somewhere to hold your .wav files that you want to burn. We'll assume
you make c:\burn for your directory.
- Lastly, you'll want to create a new text file on your desktop.
Call it burn.bat Edit this text file and put the following in it:
- @echo off
- c:
- cd \burn
- c:\cdrtools\cdrecord dev=1,1,0 speed=16 -dao -audio -pad -eject -v *.wav
- Make sure you edit the dev=1,1,0 part to reflect the physical
location you found above. Also, edit the speed=16 part to reflect the
speed you want to burn at. Now save this batch file.
- OK..you're done! Now, just put some .wavs in c:\burn and
double-click on burn.bat on the desktop! This will burn all the .wavs
in c:\burn at 16x speed, DAO, and eject the CD after burning.
- NOTE: if you get ASPI driver errors, please go to this page on the Adaptec web site and download the latest ASPI drivers:
- http://www.adaptec.com/worldwide/support/suppdetail.html?sess=no&prodkey=ASPI-4.70
- Download the file, unzip it, read the README file and run the
install.bat with the additional string (e.g. install.bat X86) as the
README says.
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