cd burning program---is Roxio the best?

[Richard D Taylor]

I had Easy CD Creator 5 and while it was okay, I did encounter some annoying problems.  Been thinking about getting a new one---does anybody have any suggestions?

[markie]

just use itunes.....
 
 Roxio is good if you have two drives and want to do disc copy though.
 
 You have a PC, not mac?

[brennser]

itunes

[Bags]

itunes question -- do you burn a DVD the same way you'd burn a CD-rom (ie, through a playlist)?  And what's the difference between data and MP3s, in terms of what someone would want to get from you....

[brennser]

uuuuhhhhhhh, markie?

[markie]

Well you burn a dvd the same way. Make a list of songs and then click burn. You get prompts to open itunes when you insert any blank media. Aim for around 950 songs to fill a DVD.
 
 The DVD is a data disc of MP3s when I do it  (I guess I could do  AACs). For CDRs you can do audio, MP3 or data MP3. I dont understand the difference between the later two. Both open in itunes identically.
 
 Some CD players wont play CDRs, a lot wont play MP3s. I guess data MP3s either CD or DVD play on even fewer players.
 
 But if you are sharing with itunes users data is fine. If you are sharing with anyone else or want mass appeal audio CDRs are the safest bet.

[Chip Chanko]

I like Nero a lot, too. Much better than Roxio. But lately I've just been using Itunes. For anything other than music I use Nero.

[Bags]

Originally posted by mark e smith:
  For CDRs you can do audio, MP3 or data MP3. I dont understand the difference between the later two. Both open in itunes identically.
 

I was just wondering for a friend who doesn't have itunes.  I'll stick with MP3s as I know that works....Thanks m.e.s.

[redsock]

I've got a question...which may be lame... but when you rip a song off a cD to itunes...how do you get it to mp3 format? as opposed to aac (m4a)?

[markie]

That is lame.
 
 Go to itunes then in the top left it will say itunes. Click...... drop down somewhere says prefernces. In preferences click importing. It is obvious from there.

[redsock]

Originally posted by mark e smith:
  That is lame.
 
 Go to itunes then in the top left it will say itunes. Click...... drop down somewhere says prefernces. In preferences click importing. It is obvious from there.

Look, when you spend as much time as I do on trying to make the music world a better place, sometimes it is the smallest things that never seem to work. I'm trying to get bands to play gigs, get CDs to review, artists to be interviewd, writers to actually write reviews, HFS kids to piss off... somehow the settings on itunes have escaped me.
 
 Oh, and thanks.    :p

[kosmo vinyl]

before you commit to the encoding in mp3, my suggest is do a little comparasion in sound between an aac file and itunes encoded mp3.  i.e. encode a song you really know well in both 128kps aac and 192kps mp3 and compare them.
 
 early reports indicate that aac encoding at lower bit rates which results in a smaller file, sound as good as a mp3 file encoded at a higher rate taking up more space on the ipod.  personally i haven't done the pepsi verses coke challendge, but kosmette ripped a good portion of her collection in aac and has no complaints.
 
 personally, i perfer mp3 coding with lame, but itunes doesn't use lame natively and you need to use a script program to perform that encoding.  it also takes a lot long to encode a file.
 
 aac is based on the mp4 standard

[markie]

But the advantage to sticking to vanilla MP3s is everyone can access them, all systems and portables support them. Therefore it future proofs your library and can making sharing with others easier.
 
 160Kbps MP3s sound fine to me

[Richard D Taylor]

Originally posted by mark e smith:
  just use itunes.....
 
 Roxio is good if you have two drives and want to do disc copy though.
 
 You have a PC, not mac?

Yeah, I have a PC.  But with itunes, can you make a cd compilation from different sources and balance the recording level so the volume doesn't jump up and down when you hear the final mix?  That was one of the features I liked about my Roxio program...
 
 Also, Roxio let me decide how much of a gap I wanted between tracks.  For example, I could have some songs with 2 seconds between each track while I could put a 4 second gap on other tracks and still put no gap at all on other songs (all on the same mix cd!).  My problem with a lot of cd burning programs is they usually only offer what I call an "all or nothing" proposition----meaning you can have all the tracks with no gap, or they can all have the same gap time (2 seconds being the most common)--- I don't really see too many programs that allow you to change the gap times track by track for a single mix disc...
 
 Roxio also allows you to fade out of a track if you want to---this is a great way of including one track on a comp that came from a cd where all the songs run together.
 
 So basically, I like the freedom that comes with Roxio. My main beef with them though is you can't use the "normalizer" (the function that enables all the songs to have a relatively similar recording level) if you want to mess around with the gap times.  Now, if I could find a program that allowed me to do both, I would be in heaven...
 
 Itunes is cool, but if it doesn't have these features than fugedaboutit...I'll settle for the Roxio that I'm still not quite satisfied with.

[markie]

Yep, Itunes, if you play around with it for about 2 minutes, will do all of that. Besides, it is free. What have you got to lose?
 
 You just have to import the tracks into compressed format and select volume normalisation in the preferences somewhere.