Some notes on making and playing CD compilations using iTunes

[dreamshark]

Apparently it's not as straightforward as I thought. barondave, your CDs play fine on both computer and CD player, but have no track information when opened in iTunes. minnehaha, yours has track information but you burned it in MP3 format. This won't play at all on an ordinary CD player and requires special handling to import into iTunes. I'm guessing that most people would like something they can play in a CD player. I checked my CDs, and they do seem to be playable on both CD players and iTunes. If there is any problem with them, let me know.

For the record, , starting with all my music imported into iTunes (most of it from CDs I own, a few songs bought and downloaded from iTunes.)

To change preferences re CD burning, select from menu: Edit->Preferences->Advanced->Burning
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I just used the default settings, which are:

• preferred speed: maximum possible


• Gap between songs: 2 seconds


• No checks in the following checkboxes: Use Sound Check, Include CD Text, MP3 CD, Data CD

Creating the compilation CD
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1) Open iTunes and create a playlist with a name (I called mine "Bottoms Up").
2) Pick the songs you want in the CD and drag them into the named play list.
3) Open the named playlist and rearrange the songs by dragging them around with the mouse.
4) With the named playlist selected, click on the Burn Disc button, in the lower right-hand corner of the main pane (at least on iTunes 7.2)

Importing a compilation CD into iTunes.
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1. Create a new PlayList with the name you want to assign to the CD.


2. Insert CD in drive, and select the CD in the lefthand pane if it is not selected already.


3. Select all the songs in the CD in the main pane and drag them into the new CD playlist displayed in the blue pane on the left.


4. Once all the songs are imported, open the new playlist and edit the track info.





• If there is no track info, the songs will be identified as Track 1, Track 2, etc. DO NOT LEAVE THEM THAT WAY. You will be really sorry after you read in the second CD full of unnamed tracks, trust me. You can fill in the track names manually with Get Info. Right click the song and select Get Info from the context menu. If you have a Mac with no right button I have no idea how you do this. Probably select the song and select Get Info from the main menu.


• You can edit info for a group of songs at once, and I recommend doing this. Select ALL the songs in the compilation, bring up Get Info. Type the name of the person who compiled the CD into Album Artist. This is an odd field that usually doesn't have anything in it anyway, and seems tailormade for this purpose. I also like to use the Grouping field. I put "Drinking Songs" into the Grouping field for all the drinking songs. Or you might prefer to label them "Compilation."

Comments

Geeks B We

[barondave.livejournal.com]

Your CD doesn't have any track information either, and lists as "audio CD". Track information is stored at Gracenote's CDDB, not on the CD. (The AIFF format doesn't carry that info.) When you enter the info into the computer, as in your step 4 "Once all the songs are imported...", that only affects the file on your computer and does not carry the information on the disc. I knew going in that the track listings wouldn't carry, which is why I was so assiduous about annotation.

Aside: I gave up trying to balance the sound levels on imported songs, and always use "Sound Check." I don't know how it works on other systems, but it seems to help balance the levels (so all the songs are roughly the same volume) on mine (and on the iPod). I never did find what "Include CD Text" does.

minnehaha K's CD has it's track listing in iTunes, but does seem to be all mp3s. While many CD players (and DVD players) will play mp3s, some will not.

To K: To make a CD-playable CD, go into Preferences --> Importing --> Import Using AIFF Encoder. OK. Go back to your files. Select All (or just the ones you want to burn). Right Click (or Advanced -->) Convert Selection to AIFF. It will take a few minutes, but all the mp3 (or any file) will now be AIFF and readable on any CD player. Use those files to make the CD. Ideally, you will have imported the files from CD in AIFF format to begin with.

Yes, I have the same song in different formats in iTunes. The formats do different things and I optimize for the listener's system.

To make sure what format you're using, View --> View Options (or Cmd-J). Check off "Kind". (You won't be able to do this for already burned CDs.) MP3s are listed as "MPEG audio file" while the above paragraph creates "AIFF audio file", which is what standard CDs use.

AIFF files are significantly larger than MP3s, so you you'll be limited to about 1.2 hours and just under 800 M (as listed at the bottom of the window). If you can't burn the files on one CD, iTunes will tell you.

Re: Geeks B We

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

Despite my best efforts, iTunes refused to burn 35 songs onto one CD (total size around 170 MB) where the CD claimed to have the capacity of 700 MB. I tried this multiple times, spent 2 hours on it, and read endless screens on iTunes help, printed the on-line instructions, and also Apple website discussion.

One might think that I had selected something other than the 35 song playlist, but I am convinced I had that selection made correctly. In any event, since iTunes WOULD burn a CD of .mp3s and nothing else, you got what I found possible.

Dave, your advice is probably meant to begin with something more like, "Under the iTunes menu, select Preferences --> Advanced --> Importing -->, etc." The amount of energy I have to decipher conflicting advice (since Sharon, like the actual help pages of iTunes, says nothing whatever about Importing into AIFF format as a requirement of burning a CD) or instructions that cannot be followed exactly and specifically is real, real small. As I said, I have already invested several hours on this process.

That said, throw the disk away if you can't play it.

K.

Re: Geeks B We

[barondave.livejournal.com]

I can play the disk just fine, thanks. Just not in my stereo. Sorry if my shorthand took too much energy to decipher; you did a good job doing so.

Importing a song as AIFF is not a requirement for burning a disk. Burning songs as AIFF is a requirement for most older CD players. I suspect virtually everybody you know can play the CD in their computer, and many of them in their car/stereo.

Aside: When I make a CD full of mps (or any format other than AIFF), I simply label it as such.

Aside II (and pardon me for geeking out on a Sunday evening): I suspect you tried to burn your 35 mp3s onto an Audio CD. iTunes tried to convert the songs to AIFF on the fly, and therefore they wouldn't fit. You did the easiest thing (and the only thing that would get all the songs on one disk), which was to check off the "MP3 CD" button (Under the iTunes menu Preferences --> Advanced --> Burning).

You came up with a workable kludge. The pride of any geek!

Re: Geeks B We

[dreamshark.livejournal.com]

I can't play your CD in my CD player, but I could import it into iTunes and from thence to my iPod. It took me a few minutes to figure out how to do it, however. When the CD popped up in iTunes, there was no "import CD" button like there is with a commercial CD. However, I was able to select all the songs from the main pane and drag them into an empty playlist I had created, and it happily imported them.

Clearly there are tradeoffs in using one format or the other. If you use the standard CD format (AAC) you can only get 74 minutes onto a CD - about 25 songs. Putting them in MPEG format lets you get a lot more songs on the same CD, but it's in a format that requires a computer to read. I don't know if there's a tradeoff in song quality. Dave? Do you know?

I hadn't realized the track info wasn't included on the AAC format, since I was verifying the disks on the same computer I had created them on. That's kind of a bummer. If there isn't some way to include the track info in that format, I think I would rather have the disks in MP3 format after all. Typing in the track info by hand is a major pain.