Preparing Your Song for CD

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To some people, the final goal of working on a song is to pop a CD into a CD player and listen to the masterpiece through a home stereo. To do this, you must first save your song to a stereo file that can be written later to CD. This process is referred to as a mixdown or export .

To perform a mixdown:

NOTE

By default, the file settings are 44100 Hz and 16 bit; however, if these settings have been changed, you will need to change them back to the default values because this is standard CD format.

To place the song onto CD, you need to use a CD-writing program. There are plenty of options and loads of resources on the Internet to research which program best fits your needs. Below are some links to some popular titles:

• Ahead Software's Nero Burning ROM (www.nero.com) Nero is perhaps the most popular CD burning software for Windows users.

• Roxio 's EZ CD Creator (www.roxio.com) Roxio's EZ CD Creator has been around for a while and has a proven track record.

• Stomp Inc. Click 'N Burn (www.stompinc.com) A newer kid on the block, Click 'N Burn offers some nice features for audio users with the addition of Click 'N Edit Sound LE, which gives you a simple but effective audio editor to clean up your tracks before burning them to CD.

• Roxio's Toast (www.roxio.com/en/products/toast/index.jhtml) Yet another offering from Roxio, but this one is for Mac users. Toast is perhaps the standard for CD burning on the Mac OS X platform.

NOTE

If you own Windows XP or a Mac OS X operating system, CD burning software is already at your fingertips. Windows' Media Player, installed with XP, is capable of burning music to CD. For more information on using Media Player, consult your Windows documentation. Mac OS X users can burn their music using the iTunes application that is part of the OS X operating system. For more information on iTunes, consult your Mac OS X documentation.

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