Burn Your Music to a CD

It’s a lot of fun to create your own personal music CDs to play in your car or home stereo. All you need is iTunes and a computer with a CD burner. Just make a playlist containing only the songs you want to copy to the CD, arrange them however you want, insert a blank CD-R disc into your computer, and then click the Burn Disc button. It’s that easy.

You can also use your CD burner to back up your music. It’s especially important to back up the music you purchase from the iTunes Music Store, just in case a file is accidentally deleted or damaged. You can back up your iTunes playlists to either a CD or DVD to store safely. See Back Up Your Purchases for more information.

Tips

Back up your iTunes Library to DVD

A single DVD stores 4.7GB of data, which holds more than 1,000 songs in MP3 or AAC format. That’s roughly equivalent to 150 music CDs on a single DVD. To burn a DVD, go to the iTunes menu, choose Preferences, the Advanced icon, and then click the Burning tab. Select the "Data CD or DVD" option in the Disc Format section, and then click OK. Now create a DVD the same way you create a CD, by creating a playlist and then clicking the Burn Disc button. Keep in mind that this DVD is for backup purposes, and cannot be used as a DVD audio disc outside of iTunes.

Change the gap between songs

iTunes will put two seconds of silence between songs you burn to a CD. If you’re burning a live or concept album you may want no silence between songs. To adjust the length of time iTunes puts between songs, go to the iTunes menu and choose Preferences. Click Advanced, and then click the Burning icon. Choose the amount of time you want between songs from the Gap Between Songs dropdown menu. You can choose between zero and five seconds between songs.

Use Sound Check when burning a CD

When burning a mix CD you might find that some songs are louder than others. If you want all your music to be played back from your CD at approximately the same volume, open iTunes Preferences, click the Burning icon, and then select Use Sound Check.

Burn across multiple CDs

If you have a playlist that you want to burn to a CD, but it’s longer than a single disc, you don’t have to create a new playlist. iTunes will burn as much music it can fit on a disc, and then request a second disk to finish burning the rest of the music.

Save more songs on a CD

If you want to fit more songs on a CD, you can burn an MP3 CD. MP3 CDs can store about 150 songs (compared to 12 or so on a standard audio CD), but you won’t be able to listen to an MP3 CD in a standard CD player. You can, however, listen to an MP3 CD on your computer or in any CD player that can play the MP3 CD format. You can select the type of CD you want to burn in the Burning tab of the Advanced pane in iTunes Preferences. To create an MP3 CD, you must have your music files saved in MP3 format before burning to a CD. For more information, see iTunes Help.

Understanding the conversion process

When you burn an audio CD, iTunes converts your music from its compressed format to a standard CD format. A CD that holds 650MB of data can hold roughly 74 minutes of music. When you burn an audio CD the music you put on the disk will be converted to an uncompressed format. Music from the iTunes Music Store is near CD quality, so you can expect high-quality sound when you create CDs with music purchased from the Music Store.

Steps

Copy a playlist to a CD

Open iTunes and then insert a blank CD into your computer.
If you’re using a Mac, a dialog box appears when you insert a blank disc. Choose iTunes from the Action menu, and click OK.
Choose the playlist you want to copy to CD. Before burning your CD, you can rearrange the songs by dragging them up or down in the list.
Your CD will be named according to the name of your playlist. If you want your CD to have a different name, double-click your playlist and change the name.
At the bottom of the iTunes window, check the size of your playlist to make sure it doesn’t exceed the amount of space on a CD (60 to 74 minutes).
Click the Burn Disc button to begin copying the songs from your computer to the CD. You can watch the progress in the iTunes window.
When the files are copied, a CD icon will appear in the iTunes Source list.
Click the Eject button to eject your CD.