CD and DVD Recording For Dummies
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This process sounds a little like the opposite of what Spotify is actually about: Burn a CD, rather than just listen to Spotify streaming from the cloud? Arguably, there’s still a place for the humble CD (even if it’s just for a nostalgia trip).

For example, if you just made a playlist of your favorite Christmas tracks, you might want to burn these tracks to a CD and send them to a friend as a personalized gift (you could decorate the front of the CD with your own design).

Or if your 1990s-era car has a CD player in it, you can always take along a few compilation CDs (and you can always fall back on the master digital files if the CDs get scratched or damaged).

To burn a CD, you need

  • A CD/DVD burner: Most computers nowadays come with a built-in DVD burner that has the capability to burn CDs. If you don’t have one of these burners, you can buy an external DVD burner that plugs into your computer’s USB port.

  • Digital music files: You need to own unrestricted digital music files, meaning music without any digital rights management (DRM) copyright restrictions built into the files, in order to burn tracks to CD.

    Spotify’s streaming tracks are encrypted, so even if you sync them to your computer or desktop app, you can’t burn them straight onto a disc. Only tracks you buy from a download store such as iTunes or Spotify’s in-house MP3 music store, or ones you’ve already ripped from a disc, can be copied onto CD.

  • Disc-burning software: You can burn a CD of your digital music tracks by using readily available software such as iTunes or Windows Media Player.

  • A blank CD: A CD-R or CD+R disc means that you can only burn (write) data to it once, but a CD-RW or CD+RW disc can be written to multiple times. The write-once CD-R or CD+R provides maximum compatibility, but newer players accept CD-RW or CD+RWs, too.

Making an audio CD you can play in a CD player is different than just burning the files straight to a disc. Many newer players do recognize MP3 files burned on a CD, but conventional CD players don’t. You need to burn an audio CD, rather than just a data CD.

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