Maximum Minutes on a CD

ido1957

ido1957

9K Gold Member
Just discovered something that confuses me a bit. I can load only so many minutes of music on a CD - doesn't matter if it's .wav or .mp3. I use Sonic's RecordNow Plus to burn CD's.

Now I would have thought that I could stick a whole lot more .mp3 files on a CD. But no, I ran out of "space" and even when I switched the last song to .mp3 to try and save space, it still calculated it on the song length, not the file size.....

What's up with that? Does size only matter when I'm storing on a CD-RW or Hard Drive?

(LOL - Does size matter - loaded question :p)

:D :) :D :)
 
When burning an audio CD, the time is the relevant factor, not size, as all tracks will be converted to .cda format. So, the maximum time (up to 80 min, depending on the CD you choose) is the same regardless of the initial format.
 
You could put the files on the Cd as data instead of audio, and fit more mp3s than wavs, but then you wouldn't be able to play the CD anywhere. At least I think..... :confused:
 
That's correct - if you burn the CD as an Audio CD, no matter what audio format you stick in your playlist of to-be-burned tracks (mp3, wav, whatever) - they all get converted to the same format, and you can only put the 80 minutes on the disk, regardless of starting filesize of each piece.

If you were to burn your mp3s onto a CD set to Data CD, you could fit more "time" since you are looking at data amounts, not time lengths. So, in that case you have 700MB to work with, and the standard wav file at 30-40MB converts to something like 4MB in mp3 format, so you can put more stuff on one CD. However, as it is data like any other file type, you can only access the mp3s on a computer, or on a CD player that is mp3-ready (can read mp3s and convert them in realtime as it plays back your music).
 
If you're wanting to burn an mp3 CD with Sonic, there should be a tab or something that says "Jukebox CD". I believe this would do what you're wanting, but like say, you can only play mp3 CD's on computers and certain CD players.
 
Yea, a data cd can hold more songs considering that you could put the files on as smaller sizes, such as an mp3. I think its 700 MB's on a cd-r. As far as I'm concerned, most new cars are data disc compatible. :)

Too bad I drive a 1995 minivan :rolleyes: .. but lets not get into that.
 
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