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Burning Your Music to a CD

It’s a lot of fun to create your own custom 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 into your computer, and then click the Burn 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.
 
 
 
Tips Step-by-Step
 
 

Store more songs on a single 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 the 12 or so a standard audio CD can store), 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 a special digital music player that uses the MP3 CD format. You can select the type of CD you want to burn in iTunes Burning preferences.

Burn your playlist to a DVD

If your computer has a drive capable of writing DVD discs, you can back up your music on a DVD. A single DVD stores 4.7GB of data, which holds more than 1000 songs. That’s roughly equivalent to 150 music CDs on a single DVD. To burn a DVD, open iTunes preferences, and then click Burning. Select the “Data CD or DVD” radio button in the Disk Format section, and then click OK. Select what you want to copy, click the Burn Disc button, and then follow the onscreen instructions.

Burn your purchased music to a CD or DVD

Its a good idea to burn your purchased music to a CD to DVD so that you have a backup copy in case something happens to your computer. Simply click the triangle next to the Music Store icon in the source list, select the Purchased Music playlist, and then click the Burn button.

If your playlist is longer than the length of a CD

If the playlist is longer than what will fit on a CD, you can either delete songs from the playlist or have iTunes burn the remaining songs on one or more additional CDs (depending on the amount of space needed).

Copy a playlist to an Audio CD by following these steps:
  1. With iTunes open, insert a blank CD into your computer.
  2. Select the playlist you want to copy to CD. Before burning your CD, you can rearrange the songs by dragging them to different positions.
  3. 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.
  4. Click the Burn button to begin copying the songs from your computer to the CD. You can watch the progress in the iTunes window.
  5. When the files are copied, a CD icon will appear in the iTunes Source list.
  6. Click the Eject button to eject your CD.
  


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