Compact Discs, as sold in stores usually contain about 74 mins. of music (15-20 songs depending on song lenth). This equated to 700 million bytes (MB) of computer data. A while back a smart guy found a way to compress the data needed to represent a song by a factor of 10 by removing the stuff in the song that people cannot hear such as subsonic sounds and instruments that are masked by other instruments/noises. The resultant file is called an MP3.  So now that same 74 minutes of music will fit into approx. one tenth the space. Therefore that same Compact Disk can hold 150 to 200 songs in MP3 format. The old (large size) formated songs are usually called Wave or Audio files by Cd burner software. The new smaller size files are called MP3's. The smaller size has meant that a song that once took 30 min to transfer on the internet from one person to another now takes 3 min. It also means that you can store an entire record collection on a moderately sized hard drive.

 

 

 

                         1) Create a place on your PC to store the songs

                             (you can use the My Music folder in                 

                             the My Documents folder)

                          

                          2) Find a place to get the music

                              (Online music stores like Real Rhapsody,

                                iTunes, Classical Archives etc... or

                              File sharing networks such as Morpheus,

                               Kazaa, iMesh etc..) 

 

                          3) Download from whichever place you

                               choose to your My Music folder

 

At this point you have the song (MP3) in your PC and you may listen to it on your PC, connect your PC to your stereo or transfer songs to your personal music player (such as Ipod). Currently there is a changeover of sorts taking place in format. From Wave to MP3. A lot of new car stereos and home audio/vid equipment now can play MP3 music (and digital photos for that matter). A word of warning: some files you download from file sharing networks can be puposely ruined or corrupted by record companies. Always listen to the whole song before burning.

 

 

  You can also burn/write 150-200 music files onto a CD and play the songs on a player that supports the format. Remember, one MP3 CD can now hold about 15 'old' format CD's.    

  To burn songs to a CD that will play on any CD player you can use the software provided by Microsoft (which is not nearly as friendly as that made by the folks at Roxio or Nero) or you can use a third party software designed for Music/Video. The MS software doesn't make it easy to see what songs are in which order and won't let you play them prior to burning. The drag and drop otions are kinda cheesy too.

  When ready to start selecting songs make sure you select what kind of files you want to write Audio/Wave vs. Data/MP3. The program doesn't know where you want to play the songs. It will be obvious if you pick the wrong one. You'll only fit about 18 songs on a standard CD.

The simplest way to burn data file such as photos and text files is to right click the Start button and  select the Explore button from the pop-up menu. This will open Windows explorer and you can drag your files from where ever you like onto the CD burner. This will place them in a "To Be Written To CD Folder " Then when you are ready you just select Write to CD