The DVD burner has always been more expensive, but its price has dropped as well. The DVD burner has largely displaced its predecessor, the CD burner , especially since prices have fallen to the point that most computer owners can afford them. DVDs and burners are widely used with video, which is storage-hungry in comparison to text and music files. Indeed, many people now download videos using file-sharing programs and then burn them to DVDs.
Most commercial discs have special safeguards to discourage their copying, however. A DVD has a recording layer coated in an organic dye. A DVD burning laser, of higher intensity than a typical DVD reading laser, etches patterns into the dye, allowing the data to be read at a later date.
When you have all of the software you need, it's time to gather some songs. You may want to take songs directly from your CD collection. To do this, you need to " rip " the songs -- copy them from your CD to your computer's hard drive. You'll need an extraction program to do this. Essentially, the program will play the song and re-record it into a usable data format. It's legal to make copies of songs you own, as long as the CD is only for your personal use.
You can also gather MP3s over the Internet. You can download MP3s from pay-for-music sites or with file-sharing programs. Some MP3s are free, and can be legally downloaded and copied onto a CD. Most are illegal copies, however, and it is a copyright violation to download them and burn them onto a CD. To search for MP3-related Web sites, click here. MP3s are compressed files , and you must expand decode them in order to burn them onto a CD. Standard music-management programs can decode these files.
If you don't have the right software, there are a number of decoding programs that you can download over the Internet. Once you've gathered the songs, you can use your music manager to arrange them in the order you want. Keep in mind that you have a limited amount of disc space to work with. CD-Rs have varying capacities , measured in both megabytes and minutes. These days, most CD-Rs are either 74 minutes or 80 minutes long.
Before you move on to burning your CD, you should make sure that your mix isn't too long for the blank disc. Once the mix is complete and you have saved it, all you need to do is insert a blank CD-R disc into the burner and choose the "burn" or "write" option in your music-management software.
You'll also need to choose the speed at which you want to burn the disc. Typically, a slower speed reduces the chance of a major error during the writing process. A lot of things can go wrong when you're burning a CD, so don't be surprised if some of them don't come out right. Since CD-Rs can not be overwritten, any irreversible mistake means you'll have to junk the whole disc.
Among the CD-burning set, this is called " making a coaster ," as that's pretty much all you can do with the damaged CD. If you continually have problems burning CDs, your drive may be defective or your music-management program may be faulty. Before you return your burner, try out some other programs and see if they yield better results.
Since MP3s are compressed files, you can fit a lot more of them on a single disc, which means you can make a longer mix. The drawback, of course, is that your disc won't work in the vast majority of CD players. CD burners have opened up a whole new world to the average computer user. With a piece of equipment about the size of a car stereo, and about the price of a cheap bicycle, you can set up your own multimedia production company! Sign up for our Newsletter! Mobile Newsletter banner close.
Mobile Newsletter chat close. Mobile Newsletter chat dots. Mobile Newsletter chat avatar. Mobile Newsletter chat subscribe. Computer Peripherals. How CD Burners Work. An external writable CD drive, also called a CD burner, lets you take music or data files from your computer and make your own CDs.
CD Basics: The Bumps " ". A CD has a long, spiraled data track. If you were to unwind this track, it would extend out 3. Reading CDs " ". Writing CDs In response to this demand, electronics manufacturers introduced an alternative sort of CD that could be encoded in a few easy steps. Burning CDs: Laser Assembly " ". Burning CDs: Write Laser " ". The machinery in a CD burner looks pretty much the same as the machinery in any CD player. There is a mechanism that spins the disc and another mechanism that slides the laser assembly.
Phase-change Compounds In phase-change compounds , these shifts in form can be "locked into place": They persist even after the material cools down again.
The Erase Laser As with CD-Rs, the read laser does not have enough power to change the state of the material in the recording layer -- it's a lot weaker than the write laser. CD Formats " ". The Yamaha CDR-D, a dual-tray stereo-component burner: With this burner, you take music tracks directly off of another CD, instead of from your hard drive. Burners like this are usually fast and accurate, but typically can only be used to create music CDs.
Photo courtesy Yamaha Electronics Corporation. Encoding Data There are a number of important aspects involved in making a CD readable to a CD player: The CD track is marked with a sort of timecode , which tells the CD player what part of the disc it is reading at any particular time. Discs are also encoded with a table of contents , located at the beginning of the track the center of the disc , which tells the player where particular songs or files are written onto the disc.
The data track is broken up by extra filler , so there are no long strings of 1s or 0s. Without frequent shifts from 1 to 0, there would be large sections without a changing pattern of reflectivity. This could cause the read laser to "lose its place" on the disc. The filler data breaks up these large sections. Extra data bits are included to help the player recognize and fix a mistake. If the read laser misreads a single bit, the player is able to correct the problem using the additional encoded data.
Recorded information is not encoded sequentially; it is interlaced in a set pattern. This reduces the risk of losing whole sections of data. If a scratch or piece of debris makes a part of the track unreadable, it will damage separate bits of data from different parts of the song or file, instead of eliminating an entire segment of information.
Since only small pieces of each file segment are unreadable, it's easier for the CD player to correct the problem or recover from it. Trailer Track. Read More. These are called "dash.
Check the speed rating. The speed rating listed on a disc is the amount of time it will take to burn the DVD. Open your DVD burning software. Select the DVD burner you wish to use when prompted.
Select the type of files you wish to burn when prompted. Select the specific files you wish to burn when prompted. Enter in a name for your disc when prompted.
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