Burn a Custom CD

Once you have arranged a playlist, you might want to burn a CD for yourself. Once the Jessica's Birthday playlist is ready, all her father needs to do is alert iTunes he wants to burn a disc.

1.	Click the Burn Disc icon at the top of the window. The button will transform into a warning iconalerting you it's ready to go, live and "hot." The information window will direct you to insert a blank CD into your Mac's Combo drive or SuperDrive.
2.	Insert a blank CD. iTunes will check to see whether the disc is good and the songs on the playlist will fit on it. The size of the playlist (in megabytes, or MB), noted at the bottom of the screen, is critical. A CD will hold only around 650 MB of music. iTunes is smart enough to coach you through splitting up your playlist over a couple CDs if it happens to be too big, or you could do it yourself. Note iTunes measures sizes by the actual size of the audio file. But when you burn a CD, iTunes converts all your files, regardless of their format, to the CD standard format, which may be larger (or smaller) than what iTunes reports for your playlist. A 650 MB CD holds about 70 minutes of music, regardless of how compressed your MP3 files are.
3.	Click the Burn Disc icon. iTunes will begin the process, spinning the Burn Disc icon as it works and keeping you posted as to the burning status in the info window at the top of the screen. In a few minutes, the disc will be complete, and your Mac will eject it automatically.

Custom CD Labels

The best complement to a custom CD is a custom label. Many software packages are available to streamline the label-making process. Some go so far as to insert photos (from iPhoto) and the list of songs (from your playlist in iTunes). They also provide cover art for your jewel case, as well as a label to affix to your CD.