An Audio CD is a CD that contains music files and that can be played with any regular CD player which you can buy in a store – the songs on the CD must either be in CDA format or be converted to this format.
Almost all CD players can only read CD-Rs, i.e. using rewritable CDs (CD-RW) is not recommended. Nero writes the audio data to the CD-RW correctly but many CD players will not be able to play back the tracks.
If possible, audio CDs should always be burned in the 'Disc-at-Once' mode. This will make the most out of the features that Nero offers and will avoid unwanted 'hiss and crackle' between individual tracks.
A CD that contains music files in a variety of different formats (say MP3 or WMA) is strictly speaking an audio CD as well, but since a CD player cannot read these formats and play them back, these CDs are not referred to as Audio CDs.
Nero does not mind what audio format the files are in because compressed files (e.g. MP3, mp3PRO, WAV, VQF, WMA or AIF) are automatically converted prior to burning so that they can be burned in CDA format. However decoding these files takes a certain amount of time and so the burning speed may have to be matched to the PC's power and computing processes.
Although writing Audio CDs with Nero is really simple, it is worth spending a few moments thinking about your source medium. There are basically two ways of creating Audio CDs. With one method the audio tracks come from an Audio CD and with the other the audio files are on a hard disk.
Note: Music CDs with a special copy protection have been around on the market for some time now. These CDs cannot be played or copied with a normal PC. If you experience problems with copying, please make sure that you are not using CDs of this type. You can identify this from a note on the cover of the original CD.