Thursday, 02 May 2019
Can I put my MP3 tunes onto audio CDs to play on my stereo, in my car etc?
There are programs that claim to be able to take MP3 files and decode them and burn them to an audio CD all in one operation… MP3 CD Maker is one such program. I believe Nero can also do this. I tried MP3 CD Maker, and I couldn’t get it to even burn a single track successfully, and many other people seem to have had problems with it as well… but I suppose *somebody* somewhere must have got it to work. Nero I haven’t tried.
Personally I still use a two step process… well I guess three step really:
1) Decode the MP3 files to WAV files. Generally any MP3 player will do this. E.g. in Winamp Ctrl-p for Preferences, select Output, select Nullsoft Disk Writer plugin, and press the Configure button to choose the directory for your WAV files. Then just «play» the songs you want to convert. Don’t forget to go back into Preferences and set Output back to Nullsoft Wave Out plugin when you’re done, so Winamp will go back to playing audio rather than producing WAV files.
2) Edit the WAV files as required… trim out bits you don’t want, adjust the level as required, etc. Goldwave is a good shareware program for doing this (www.goldwave.com). If the files are sampled at a rate other than 44.1 KHz you will also need to resample them to 44.1 KHz before they can be burned to an audio CD.
3) Burn the edited WAV files to an audio CD. I use Adaptec Easy CD Creator (it came with my burner, and it works). Pretty much any CD burning program should be able to burn an audio CD from WAV files sampled at 44.1 KHz without a problem. Make sure that you choose the «Audio CD» option – you don’t want to just copy the WAV files to a data CD. Also, if you want the disk to play and select tracks without a problem in various audio CD players, you might want to try and use the «Disk at once» option, which burns the whole CD without turning off the laser (selected on the «Advanced» tab just before you do the actual recording in Easy CD Creator). CDs burned in «disk at once» mode will generally be handled better by audio CD players. CDs burned in «track at a time» mode, where the laser is turned off between each track, will generally play ok, but many audio CD players can’t successfully skip to any track other than the first on such disks, which is kind of a pain.
For Mac users a similar process can be used, but things are just a little different. On a Mac you want to decode your MP3 files to AIFF files (rather than WAV, which is a Windows format)… Mpecker Decoder (from www.anime.net/~go/mpeckers.html) will do this for you. Then you can use a Mac CD Burning program, of which the best known is probably Toast from Adaptec, to burn the AIFF files to an audio CD.
top of the page
