1 – First catch the turkey

Obviously, the first thing you need is a bundle of music tracks to burn to CD. In my example, I’ve used Sound Recorder to record tracks from a cassette of backing music for a Christmas play for kids – cassettes are notoriously prone to snappage and tangling, so a CD has to be a better bet. I’ve named them and, just to be sure I’ve got them in the right order, stuck a numeric value at the front of the file name.

2 – Load a blank CD

As you pop a vlank CD-R or RW into your drive, Windows XP pops up a message box asking what you want to do with it – do you want to open a writable CD folder using Windows Explorer, or would you prefer to take no action? I’ve just OK’ed it and minimised the resultant folder that appears on the desktop – we’re not going to need it for this job.

3 – Send the files to the CD

It’s so easy. Select the files/tracks you want on the CD, and right click anywhere in the list. A pop-up menu gives you the opportunity to send the tracks to a music CD. That would be the option we want, then!

You’ll note that the context menu is clever enough to read the file extensions and realise that we’re talking about sound files here, and so offers you other functions, too.

You may find that when Media Player opens – for it’s from there that the deed is done – that you’ve got tracks in there from a previous playlist. If so, simply delete them, and leave only the tracks you want to have on your CD.

If they’ve been copied across in the wrong order, you can sort them to suit yourself by simply dragging and dropping them where you need them. It’s all quite simple.

4 – Record it!

When you’re happy with the order of tracks, simply click on the “Copy Music” button at the top right of Medial Player’s window, and watch as each file is first converted to .cda format and then written to the CD in your drive.

Even if you’ve put mp3 format files in there, they’ll be converted to .cda format, too, so you can play them in an ordinary CD player

Once the job is finished, and your CD recorded, the new compilation will be ejected from your burner, ready to go. Ignore any error messages you may get – the CD will be spot on – at least the five or so I’ve done have all been perfect!

David Dorn