computer CD burning

[Leanmean]

Hello all! Here are some questions from one who knows nothing about this but would like to learn. :lol:

Here's the background info:
At first I will simply record individual songs from several different CDs directly to the new CD but I might eventually want to mix the recordings and want the ability to speed up the pace (what's it called?), maybe repeat a vocal or a beat or a melody, fade the vocal in and out, etc. I want to create these for my personal listening pleasure so I can put my favorites on one CD.

1) What type of hard drive capacity should I buy for high quality CD burning: 20, 40, 60 or 80 gig?

2) Does soft memory capacity matter and if so, how much should I get?

3) What program should I buy to burn the CDs?

4) ABout what can I expect to pay for this CD burner?

5) What program do I need to design a CD cover?

[BrunoRepublic]

[quote="Leanmean"]

For the purpose of this questionnaire; I will assume you're running Windows... if you've got a Mac, well... ask Bernie :)

"1) What type of hard drive capacity should I buy for high quality CD burning: 20, 40, 60 or 80 gig? "

-- As big as you can afford. Uncompressed CD audio takes up about 10 megs per minute, which adds up quickly! You can never have too much hard drive space.

"2) Does soft memory capacity matter and if so, how much should I get?"

-- I take it you mean RAM? It does matter, but only in the sense that you should have the optimal amount needed to run the OS. For Windows 95 or 98, this means at least 128 megs. Don't bother getting more than 256 megs, as these older versions of Windows won't make use of it. However, if you're using Windows 2000 or XP, you should have at least 256 megs. These will run on less RAM, but they will be a lot slower and need to do a lot of hard disk swapping. This isn't a problem when you're surfing the net or typing a document, but many CD burners will produce "coasters" if the hard disk can't provide the data fast enough.

"3) What program should I buy to burn the CDs? "

-- If you get a CD burner, it will probably come with either Nero or EZCD Creator. I've used both, although only the basic version of EZCD. I found Nero to be more powerful, but potentially confusing and not very forgiving of "user error". EZCD is very simple to use, and this is what I'd recommend to anyone who is new to CD cooking.

Also, download Exact Audio Copy. It's free, and it's the best tool out there for ripping tracks from your existing CDs.

"4) ABout what can I expect to pay for this CD burner?"

--They're quite inexpensive nowadays. My old 8x burner died on me a few months ago, so I went to the local shop and asked for a cheap but reliable replacement. I got a 24x burner for $70 Cnd. The 32x ones weren't much more. And I think they're even cheaper now! Compare this to only a few years ago, when they cost hundreds of dollars, would do 2x at the fastest, and were rather unreliable. Technology marches on....

"5) What program do I need to design a CD cover?"

--It all depends on what you want to do. I think EZCD comes with a basic CD cover program; some of the blank labels that you can buy (like Avery or Neato) come with one as well. If you just want to put some text on whatever images you've got, these will do fine. But you can really use any application that allows you to print out the results. I use Photoshop, but the full version is very expensive... but most of what I'm doing is taking scanned in LP covers and reformatting them for CD, cleaning up the photos, changing all the text.... not exactly your typical home compilation stuff. You could also use Paint Shop Pro, Corel Draw, even Word...

[K-Bee]

Since Graham already covered most of what there is to know about the subject of CD burning, let me finish it off by saying this:

you really ought to get a hold of the Musicmatch Plus programme. it may not be free, but it will do everything for you:
convert Wav to MP3 (and vice versa)
create & burn cd's from playlists
make audio covers
automatic (or manual) id tagging for mp3 files.

it also has a direct cddb connectivity - hard to live without these days.
All 'n all it's like a very advanced version of winamp & you get a very reliable cd burning programme as well.
I'm never using any thing else.

I know it sounds like I'm sponsored by by music match - well I'm not. I'm just very satisfied with the software :)

[Leanmean]

Thanks for your help guys! I really appreciate it!

[mikkelbreiler]

"Here's the background info:
At first I will simply record individual songs from several different CDs directly to the new CD but I might eventually want to mix the recordings and want the ability to speed up the pace (what's it called?), maybe repeat a vocal or a beat or a melody, fade the vocal in and out, etc. I want to create these for my personal listening pleasure so I can put my favorites on one CD."

Mixing or generally working with audio applying filters and cutting them up is not fun using only one harddrive.
Take CoolEdit as an example:
I setup two different directories for my temporary files.
D:\TEMP and E:\TEMP, both of there are on two physically different disks. The files I have sampled from my records are on drive F: also physical different. my system software and its swapfile and temporarily space for anything but CoolEdit is on C: .. you guessed it - another physical drive.
The optimal is 4 drives. My C: system disk uses an old 1.6GB Fujitsu disk, the temporary disks D: and E: are fast 20GB IBM disks bought 2 years ago. and the F: sotrage disk is 45GB IBM disk. The Fujitsu disk is 5400RPM MODE4 and the IBM disks are Ultra ATA66.
That maxes out the chassis. And the machine is only used for restoring vinyl.
My raw datasamples are read from F: and filters are applying and CoolEdit alternated between the temporary disks, so it is seamles read,filter,write a joy to use. The final wav downsampled to 16bits is stored again on F: and from there LAME makes an mp3 of the wavfile onto my tempdrives. And then the original samplefile is deleted. (This frees more than than half the space because I sample in 24bits resolution and store in 32bit resolution. 32bits are used when applying filters right up to downmixing prior to cutting up into seperate wavs for audio cd. And I allow for large start and end times before and after a recording.

"1) What type of hard drive capacity should I buy for high quality CD burning: 20, 40, 60 or 80 gig?"

I usually do this:
Several harddrives are available, the small ones are cheap and the big ones are expensive - but if you check the prices, the biggest one and the next biggest one have a price a magnitude over the third nd fourth in line. So somewhere on the pricecurve the 3rd or 4th largest disk is the one it is most cost benefit to buy.
Same thing with CPUs actually.

"2) Does soft memory capacity matter and if so, how much should I get?"

it matters, to sum it up. audio work is much like graphics work. 2.5 times the size of the largest object (i.e. a sample of a recorddise, a bitmap scan of a CD cover et cetera) is the size you want to start with.
Add 32MB for basic operation (operating system).
On top that add an additional 8MB for each smaller program that you have open while editing audio. if those small programs are to be used while waiting for an effect to be applied to a audio, like a browser to check this site, reading your email or what not, add 16MB for each program you will actively use while using your music editing software.
in short:
32MB for system
8/16MB per other program in use.
2.5*the size of your data, for the audio file.

example:
32MB for my system
16MB for CoolEdit
16MB for InternetExplorer
400MB for data (20 minutes of 32bit audio)

that becomes 1064MB. or for short two GB memory.

Now most people will say this is overkill, so if you can go back to the previous setup of using several disks to spread the load of editing using hard drives, you can compensate for the swapping by adding a disk for each step in the procedure of applying filters. I use 384MB of memory and have some disks that are always 10-13GB available on at any time. With so much memory and only large files that are rarely fragmented on the temp drives.

"3) What program should I buy to burn the CDs?"

If your platform is a PC, I'd go with NERO. But, as someone else commented, you have to know what you are doing as you can easily make coasters with Nero, because it is gives you a large freedom to do what you want it will not keep you from shooting your self in the foot.

"4) ABout what can I expect to pay for this CD burner?"

This is not a concern, a real concern is reliability. So ask your dealer for the cheapest burner with which his experience is that people do not come back becuase it either won't work properly in their computer, comes with flaky software, makes coasters using brand name discs. And so on.
With the competitive prices dealers have he will give you something he will have a lesser hassle with after sales.

"5) What program do I need to design a CD cover?

"

Well I'd go with Corel Draw if it has to be fancy, or to have the freedom to do what I want. But for the people who want fast results that are not impressive but faster to do and who do require more tools to make graphics appealing or fonts to create something unique, I'd go with any program that is either build into the burningsoftware, like with Easy CD Creator. Or any 4-5star rated CD cover-making program on Tucows, download.com and any other program service.

-breiler