Burning audio files

[BK]

I have 727MB of audio files (.wav) in my computer and I want to burn them into an audio CD which can be read from CD players, stereos, etc.

Is it possible to burn all the files into one CD?
What burning speed would you recommend for burning audio CDs?
Which burning software would you recommend?
Which brand of CDR would you recommend?

Thx.

[Wayniac]

Season's Greetings BK.

Is it possible to burn all the files into one CD?

- I don't know, but due to the way the FAT32 file system works in Win98, these files will always take up more ALLOCATED space than they would otherwise occupy on a cd. When you run your cd-buring software, you'll "drag and drop" these files to the project window and a bar graph at the bottom of the screen will let you know when you're hitting the limit.


What burning speed would you recommend for burning audio CDs?

- I have never had any trouble burning at 8x speed or higher. The actual tracking/error correction circuits in your everday cd-player are pretty good these days - I'd be more worried about the brand of media. Note however that audio-only cd's have a low recording speed like 4x.


Which burning software would you recommend?

- Where audio cd's are concerned, depends entirely on your personal preference. For grabbing tracks you can use a stand-alone program like Audio Grabber or EAC (Exact Audio Copy) or Adaptec Easy CD Creator. For creating the actual cd you can use Nero or Adaptec Easy CD Creator; use track-at-once for songs with gaps in between or disc-at-once for albums with no pause between the tracks. If you get "Jumps" in disc-at-once mode between tracks, you can easily edit the gaps between. Please not that if you create an audio cd and don't close the session (you want to add more later), your domestic cd player will only read the first session and ignore all the tracks you added in subsequent sessions.


Which brand of CDR would you recommend?

- Depends on how much you want to spend and how much you value the song's you're creating. Many unbranded and dirt-cheap cd's come from the RiteK factory (use Cd-r identifier to check where they came from), and even some of the "improved" Ritek cd's have poor build quality: flaking, cracking and "pits" appearing on the underside.

I have used many other brands for archiving my cd collection and have found the following brands to work very well in a broad range of equipment:

Sony, Verbatim - Excellent. Stand the test of time and heat stress.

Memorex, Traxdata - Cheaper but still very good.

Riteck (Mirror etc) - problems with ageing and very poor build quality with certain variants.

Kodak Gold - Good for older cd players having trouble with cd-r's (gold relfects better).

Also, your PC should be geared towards cd-writing. Use a program like Memturbo, to optimise the windows disc cache. Also, use a permanent swap file (2.5x ram size for min/max setting) and in Win98/98SE make sure the typical role of your PC is "server" and not "desktop". Also make sure there aren't any programs running in the background that you don't need. Finally, ideally partition your drive so that you can have a seperate "logical" drive for high-speed buring and/or defragment your main drive to avoid buffer under-runs.

Please note: Make sure you cd-player can accept cd-r's as some cannot/will not (like certain Sony models - epescially some of their DVD players).

Hope this helps.

All the best m8 :-)

[obs]

Is it possible to burn all the files into one CD?

yes, it should be possible. audio CDs are formatted different from data CDs (ISO9660) so whereas the data limit is 700MB, it does not translate into 700MB of wav files that you want to burn as an audio disc. that is why they say 700MB/80min. if you took an 80min audio CD and ripped the files into .wav format, it would be more than 700MB.