Burning CDs

First, A Little History

The venerable CD, or Compact Disc, has been a part of the home audio consumer’s life since 1982. It was a revolution in delivering extremely high quality audio recordings, at least in comparison to the audio tape and LP records that were available at the time. However, while the popularity of the LP record faded quite quickly, the audio tape industry continued to flourish. Why? Well because people were making copies of CDs onto audio tape. And if consumers were not making illegal copies of CDs, they were making their music available to use in their car tape players.

The CD-ROM, or data form of CD, was available to home computer users in 1985. The recordable version of CD-ROMs, the CD-Recordable (CD-R), wasn’t introduced until 1988. At that time, the drives cost thousands of dollars and were large appliances. Blank discs cost $100. By the mid-1990′s the cost of a CD-R drive had dropped considerably. They had dipped under $1000 dollars, and blank discs were around $8.00.

Look How Far We’ve Come

Pretty speedy CD-R drives are currently available (March 2003) for less than $50, and the blank media can be had for less than a quarter per disc. Most computers that are sold today are available with a CD recorder that is either included for free, or as an option for another $20 or so.

There are two types of blank media available. Blank CD-R discs are to be used essentially once. They have a capacity of 650-700 MB of data or about 75-80 minutes of audio. Once you fill the disc, that’s it. No changing the data on the disc. CD re-writable discs (CD-RW) are reusable CDs. You can write to and erase from them thousands of times (at least theoretically).

One last question before we move on. Why is it called a CD “burner”? CD recorders use a type of laser to record the data onto the discs. The laser actually heats up one of the layers of the CD to encode the information. Hence, you burn a CD. The How Stuff Works web site has more info on CD Burning. The next section will discuss the many uses of a CD burner.

So what do you need to create a CD? Well, to start with you need a desktop or laptop/notebook computer. A PC or Macintosh will do an equally fine job. Linux/Unix machines are certainly capable of burning CDs, but we won’t cover any specific hardware or software that works with that computer platform.

You also need blank CDs. You have two options – CD-R and CD-RW discs. There are two basic sizes of discs as well – 650MB/74 minutes and 700MB/80 minutes. One more thing. You may have seen “music” recordable CDs for sale and noticed they’re more expensive than the regular CD-Rs you see. You may be asking, “Do I need to buy music recordable CDs for making audio CDs?” Don’t waste your money. Music recordables are intended for the consumer stand-alone CD recorders. If you have a computer CD recorder, you can use the cheaper “data” CDs for recording music.

Hardware

If you are purchasing a brand new PC, it won’t cost you too much to upgrade to a CD-RW drive. Often the drive is a free upgrade. There are number of different manufacturers that will supply the drive, and often it can vary from month to month what brand a given computer maker will use, depending on the supply.

For a Macintosh there isn’t too much choice as far as an internal CD-RW drive. You have the Combo Drive, which is a DVD-ROM and CD-RW, or there is the Super Drive, which is a CD-RW and DVD-RW (Yes, it writes DVDs!). There are some Macs that come with a basic CD-ROM drive, but the trend from Apple is to supply some type of burner.

The hardware interface for the internal drives is usually EIDE for both PC and MAC. If you choose to get an external CD-RW drive (one that sits outside the computer), both Macs and PCs have numerous choices. Before you get ready to buy an external CD-RW drive, you should know that there are three possible interfaces available – USB 1.1, USB 2.0, and IEEE 1394 or what Apple calls Firewire. Newer Macs and PCs support USB, and therefore there are several choices of external CD-RW drives with a USB interface. Macs generally come with a Firewire card right out of the box, but there’s limited support for USB 2.0, so Mac folks usually opt for a Firewire CD-RW. The Firewire connection is much faster than USB 1.1 and about equal to the speed of USB 2.0. PCs don’t usually come standard with Firewire, so USB 2.0 is a good choice for doing high speed CD burning.

One last thing to keep in mind when looking for a CD-RW is its read and write speed. You might see a drive listed as 40X/12X/48X. This refers to the write speed for CD-R disc (in the above example, 40X), write speed to a CD-RW disc (12X), and finally the read speed of the drive (48X). The X refers to how many times faster the drive is compared to writing at real time speed. In other words, if you are creating a 74 minute audio CD, a 1X drive would take 74 minutes to write it. A 40X drive would write it 40 times faster, or less than 2 minutes. By the way that 40X is the pure writing speed. There is some additional time the CD writer needs to actually complete the entire disc writing process. Oh the games manufacturers play with numbers.

Software

The software to control the CD burning process varies somewhat, but they all do the same basic thing. For the PC the popular software titles are Roxio’s Easy CD Creator, and Ahead software’s Nero Burning ROM. There is also Stomp’s Click and Burn, and Iomega’s Hot Burn. For the Mac, the popular program is Roxio’s Toast, but there is also iTunes (for audio CDs), Hot Burn (Iomega), and Discribe.

So how do you burn a CD?