What format to burn audio?

[cleo]

I was finally able to record my RealAudio stream to my hardrive. What format do I need to save it as in order to burn it to CD to play it in a regular CD player? I know on a Windows machine you burn the .wav file... how do I do it on my iMac? .aiff?

[firewire2001]

Originally posted by cleo
I was finally able to record my RealAudio stream to my hardrive. What format do I need to save it as in order to burn it to CD to play it in a regular CD player? I know on a Windows machine you burn the .wav file... how do I do it on my iMac? .aiff?

If you use iTunes you can just save it as .wac or .aiff or .mp3... You can also burn from any pof these formats using Toast.

You cannot just burn a CD with a file like Audio.aiff cause cd players cannot play it. You must create an "Audio CD" with iTunes or Toast.

Burning a CD doesn't really have to do with the orginal format of the file since the program you use will convert the orginal file to Audio CD format -- the file format only depends upon what the CD burning application supports.

-f

[Gus]

You have to remember that if you convert it to mp3, then you will lose a little bit of quality. Keeping it as an aiff will retain as much quality as you can really burn. wav isn't a bad format either.

Gus

[cb911]

i thought that for a audio CD to be read by a normal CD player it had to be wav.
and sure you'll lose a bit of quality if you convert to MP3, but you won't even notice it. anyway, what does MP3 have to do with *audio* CD's?

[Paolo]

You can't convert it as an MP3... wav or aiff are the two that work on a cd player... mp3 will work if you've got an mp3 player.

If you convert to mp3 you won't lose quality if you choose a high enough thingy (I forget what it's called... bit rate, frequency.. something like that).
Yeah but... hope that helps

[Gus]

Programs like iTunes allow you to take a collection of MP3's and burn them to an audio CD that can be played in ANY CD player. That's the whole idea with iTunes. If you burn any of these formats as a DATA CD then sure, the CD player won't even recognize the disc, but using the aforementioned software, you will be just fine. Toast does this as well. If you have an AIFF or WAV file, then iTunes can convert them to MP3s as well (although, you wouldn't have to do this unless you were making a DATA CD sice AIFFs take up much more room from a file standpoint.

My 2¢

Gus

[Dr_Floyd]

The thing to do is import the MP3 from what ever format in as high a quality as possible before burning, if it's a realaudio file then its most likely not CD quality anyway.....


Just a thought

[alex_ant]

If you have a RealAudio file you want to put on a CD such that it's playable in an ordinary CD player, you will have to either 1) find a program that can convert RealAudio to a lossless format like wav or aiff, or 2) play the RealAudio file on one computer and use another computer to record it and save it as a wav or aiff. RealAudio is a proprietary compressed format that needs to be converted to something more widely used before it can be burned to an audio CD.

Once you've got one of those done, you would use e.g. iTunes to burn the wav or aiff file you've got to a CD. You have to make sure you're making an audio CD, though - you can't use the Finder to drag & drop the file to the CD, because that puts an ISO9660 filesystem on the CD which the audio CD player can't read.

[Paolo]

Originally posted by Gus
Programs like iTunes allow you to take a collection of MP3's and burn them to an audio CD that can be played in ANY CD player. That's the whole idea with iTunes. If you burn any of these formats as a DATA CD then sure, the CD player won't even recognize the disc, but using the aforementioned software, you will be just fine. Toast does this as well. If you have an AIFF or WAV file, then iTunes can convert them to MP3s as well (although, you wouldn't have to do this unless you were making a DATA CD sice AIFFs take up much more room from a file standpoint.

My 2¢

Gus

np it cant can it??? the only way to listen to mp3s on a cd player is by converting them! so it would have to convert them before burning

[Gus]

I'm not trying to say that you can take a bunch of MP3s , burn them to a disk and just pop it into a CD player and they'll work. What I'm trying to say is that if you have MP3s that you want to make an audio CD out of, then you can put them into iTunes, and then use IT to burn an audio CD, not a MP3 CD.

Gus