Creating Audio CD's

Redbook CD-DA

The first CD format which defined the music CD that could be played in all standalone CD players was called CD Digital Audio, CD-DA or just CD-A. The specifications for the CD-A format were set out in the 1980 "red book" standard developed by Philips and Sony. The Red Book standard specifies the data format for digital audio and the technical specifications for devices and media.

The CD-DA format standard dictates a sample rate of 44.1 kHz, with each sample being16 bits long. As a result, one second of stereophonic sound uses 176,400 bytes of disk space. The data is stored in 2,352 byte data blocks along with error detection/correction and control data thus requiring 75 blocks for each second of audio playback. Since a standard 74-minute CD will hold about 747 MB we can determine that a minute of uncompressed audio takes about 10 MB of disk space.

So - now all you have to do is resample your favorite wav, wma or mp3 file to 44.1kHz, remove the header, break it into 16 bit pieces and write the data, error and control data to a CD with your CD burning software.

Or if that sounds like too much work you can use software that does the job for you. We'll show you two such examples: Fx Magic Music and Nero Burning. Since both these applications have their own extensive Help files we're only going to show you the upper level windows.

Fx Magic Music:

Click the CD Options button on the main tool bar, select Audio CD from the New CD Setup window and press the Create Audio CD button.

The CD burner window will open with an empty list.

Find the sound files that you want, select then in Windows Explorer and drag...

...and drop them onto the empty list.

As you can see we selected 128 minutes of music which is obviously far too many for an 80 minute CD so we'll have to remove some.

To avoid having to go back and remove files you may find it easier to add a few files at a time.

Now press the Start Burn button and wait for your CD to pop out.

Nero Burning

In the New Compilation window, select Audio CD, set your parameters and press the New button.

A new window with an empty list will appear.

Using Nero's internal file browser select the files that you want to burn to disk.

Once again we selected too many files and will have to remove some.

As was suggested earlier, adding a few files at a time makes managing size easier.

Now press the Burn icon on the main tool bar.

When you have set all the parameters as you like, press the Write button.

If you're interested in CD technology please go to the Data CD's page next. If you just want to know how to burn CD's skip to MP3 or Mixed Format pages.