Making your own music CD out of mp3s.

In response to chaplndave:

"I am so new at this...do you need to format the CDR media before you try to burn anything onto it?  And do you always have to convert the MP3 files to .wav to be able to listen to your new CD on a CD player?  I feel like an idiot here...but if I don't ask I will never know."

First things first...nope, it is not necessary to format your CD-R media before you try to burn anything onto it.  If you are using a CD-RW disc and you want to erase what is on it then that's when you want to format it.  Anything that gets burned onto a CD-R disc is there for good.  If you make a mistake using a CD-R disc then you have one additional coaster to add to your coffee table.  :P

Second, yes, you do have to convert your .mp3 files to .wav files if you want to listen to them on a regular CD player (i.e. car deck, home stereo, etc...unless it's a computer of course).  You see, the regular CD players weren't made to read the .mp3 format...unless you have one of the new ones that read both regular and .mp3 format files.

How do you convert your .mp3 files to .wav files?  Easy.  Download Winamp and make a playlist of the songs that you want converted.  Winamp has a plug-in that automatically converts the songs from .mp3 to .wav.

Here are the steps:

• Go to Options
• Preferences
• Click on Output in the Plug-ins section (you'll see a selection in the right hand window)
• Select the Nullsoft Disk Writer plug-in [OUT_DISK.DLL]
• Press the Configure button (down below) to designate a folder where you want the converted files to be stored
• Press the Close button
• Press Play on Winamp and watch it convert the .mp3 files to .wav

Make sure you switch it back to the Nullsoft waveOut plug-in before you listen to your songs again.  Otherwise, you will be converting them again and not listening to them.

Once you have them converted you can now burn them onto your CD and listen to them on any CD player.  You can either close the CD or just close the session.  It really doesn't matter.  However, if you add more sessions to your CD you can only play the first session's worth of music and the player cannot read the other sessions you burned.

If you just want to take songs from the CDs you already own and make a compilation of them then I would recommend Audiograbber (mentioned this in the Eudora posts). You can just "grab" the songs out of the discs in .wav format and just burn the songs to make your compilation disc.  I'm sure there are other programs out there that are probably free and does the same thing that Audiograbber does.  I'm just a creature of habit I guess.  Besides, I'm really happy with what Audiograbber does.

Have I confused you enough? ??? Hit me back if you need further clarification.  Don't feel too dumbfounded about this.  I was in the same shoes you were in too.

or you could just use music match jukebox 5.5 or higher (the shareware version burns at 2x but the rest is fully functional)

If you use Easy CD Creator you dont have to convert the mp3's to wavs, it does it for you.  

Well. Be careful with that. Easy CD Creator tends to forget to turn on the burnproof technology for your drive when it's converting mp3s to cda. The new drives with anticoaster technology will still coaster when using adaptec to convert mp3s to cda before burning.