Creating your own CDs

Windows Media Player enables you to create your own CDs from your playlists. You can copy any tracks to your CD, except for live streams, such as radio stations. The content owner specifies if copying tracks to a CD or device other than your computer is allowed.

You must have the following items to create your own CDs:

Windows Media Player Adaptec CD-Burning component. Installed during setup of Windows Media Player. If you did not install the component with Windows Media Player, you can upgrade your version of Windows Media Player from the Web. For more information, see Related topics.
CD recorder and CDs to which you can copy. You can use either compact disc-recordable (CD-R) or compact-disc rewritable (CD-RW) CDs. You can copy tracks to a CD-R only once, but you can play it using any CD player. You can copy tracks to a CD-RW an infinite number of times, but you can play it using only computer CD-ROM drives.

Note Because you can copy only once to a CD-R, be certain about the tracks you want to copy and their length so that the tracks will use most of the space on the CD.

Playlists should be no more than 74 minutes long (or 650 MB), which is the CD-R time limit.

You can copy the following file formats to a CD: MP3 (.mp3), audio (.wav), and Windows Media (.asf, .wma, and .wmv).

Information about the track, such as the album name, artist, genre, or information about the individual tracks is not copied to the CD that you create. When you insert a CD that you have created into the CD-ROM drive, the number of the track, for example, Track 1, is displayed. You can use Windows Media Player to add information about the tracks to the CD that you make.

The compression quality that you use to copy CD tracks to your computer affects the sound quality of the track, but does not affect the length of the track when copying from your computer to a CD. The better the sound quality you use to copy a track to your computer, the better the sound quality the track has when you copy it from your computer to the CD. If you use the best quality sound to copy a track to your computer, the track will use more disk space on your computer. For more information, see Related topics.

If you interrupt copying tracks to your CD, you can continue making the CD later, even with CD-R.

If you have more than one CD recorder drive, Windows Media Player copies to the first drive only.