How to Put a Lot of Music Onto One CD

By Stephen Lilley

A standard blank CD can hold 70 to 80 minutes of music, depending on the brand. This is great if you want to burn a copy of your favorite band's new CD, but is entirely worthless for long car rides. Luckily, there is a way to get around this. By burning an mp3 CD, you can fit 700 to 800 megabytes of music onto one CD, which equals about 150 songs at standard lengths and file sizes.

Make sure that whatever CD player you intend to use this disc on is capable of playing mp3 CDs. Most newer CD players and car stereos have the ability to play these discs, but if your unit is older than 2005 or so you may want to consult your instruction manual just to be sure. If you try to play an mp3 CD in a CD player that doesn't support the format, the disc will not play.

Place a blank CD-R disc in your computer's CD writer drive.

Open a program capable of burning songs onto mp3 discs. Windows Media Player and Apple's iTunes are both examples of free software that will serve this purpose. Windows Media Player comes installed on all computers running the Windows operating system, and iTunes can be downloaded and installed free by clicking on the link in the "References" section of this article.

Add all the songs you'd like to your list of files to burn within the program you've chosen to use. If you're using Windows Media Player, click on the "Burn" tab and add the songs to this playlist. If you're using iTunes, simply create a new playlist and add your songs here.

Click on the "Settings" menu of the program you're using to burn your CD to change the output type to "mp3" CD.

Click "Burn." This will burn all of the songs you've selected to your CD in a format that is only playable on CD players and car stereos capable of playing mp3-formatted discs.

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