The first and the most important thing you need is a CDR (CD Recorder) or CDRW (CD Rewriter) Sometimes referred to as a CD Burner. There are many good units you can get if you don't already have one. Get the fastest Cdr or Cdrw you can afford and go with a SCSI if you can afford it. If not the IDE Cdr's perform just fine as long as you understand the limitations. IDE drives can not receive data as fast as a scsi drive so it takes longer to burn a CD I recommend that you not attempt to run other programs while burning your audio CD's or data CD's for that matter. Disable any screensavers or any other program that could slow the data stream to your CDR. I will explain in why: Once you start burning a CD the CDR requires a constant data stream, it can not be stopped once its started, if anything interrupt's the data stream from your processor to the CDR the Disk will fail! Keep all this in mind.

Next you need a CD 'burner' program. There are many programs available like Easy CD Creator , Nero, WinOnCd, Fireburner,etc. Most of these newer programs can create audio CD's directly from Mp3 files. Many older programs can only create CD's from wave files, so you will have to convert your Mp3's to wave files (wave are the files with .wav extension), you can use Winamp to do this and I will show you how. You also can find the Information on all these programs and many others in our Utilities section.

Converting Mp3 song to a Wave file

First get the latest version of Winamp (I used version 2.61), you can find it in our players section.

Open the song that you want to convert or a list of songs. Now you will have to make a little change in the configuration in order for Winamp to know that you want to convert the songs to wave files instead of playing them. Press Ctrl+P to open 'Winamp Preferences' window and click on 'Output' section on the left menu, then choose 'Nullsoft Disk Writer plug-in v1.x' from the list of output devices on the right side. Now you have to tell the Winamp where to save the converted wave files. Click on 'Configure' button on the bottom of the window and choose a folder where you want your files to be saved. Now click 'Close' to go back to the player.

When you play a song now you won't hear any sound, because Winamp is converting your Mp3 instead of playing it. That's it, Now if you want your Winamp to play songs again you will have to change it to 'player' mode again. You can do it from the same 'Preferences' window as before, just go to 'Preferences' and choose 'Nullsoft wave-Out plug-in 2.x' again on the right side and everything goes back to normal.