How to Burn A CD from iTunes

The great audio player iTunes is the default media player on Mac OS X. Because of its great features, many Windows (Including Windows 8) users are also using it to play music and movies. One great feature of iTunes is that it's capable of burning CDs so that you can use iTunes to burn your favorite songs to CD either for backup, sharing with family and friends or play the songs on your CD players or DVD players.

To burn a CD from iTunes, you will need a CD-R/CD-RW or DVD-R/DVD+R drive. Before directly going to the step by step guide on how to burn CD from iTunes, let's have a look at the CDs that iTunes can burn. Generally speaking, iTunes allows you to burn CDs in the following three formats:

1. Audio CD: Audio CD is just like the music CD you buy at a store and can store about 700MB of data, that means music lasting about 80 minutes.

2. Data CD or DVD: Data CD or DVD is a standard CD-ROM or DVD-ROM that is recorded with audio files. Note that standard audio CD player cannot play this kind of disc (Even if the audio player supports MP3). You can only play it on your computer with an audio player.

3. MP3 CD: An MP3 CD store MP3 files in data format. It can be played on audio CD players that supports MP3 CD format. You can store up to 160 4-mimute songs on one disc since MP3 files are very small. You can also play MP3 CD on iTunes.

After having the general knowledge about iTunes burning CD, now just follow the below guide and tips to burn CD from iTunes.

How to burn a CD from iTunes

1. Open iTunes. If you haven't installed iTunes on your computer yet, go to the iTunes website to download and install it.

2. Create a playlist that you want to burn to the CD on iTunes. You can do this by clicking File > New Play List or hitting the "+" button on the bottom left. And then you will see a new playlist named "Untitled Play List" has been added. You can click the text field to change its name to the one you like.

3. Now add the songs you want to burn to the play list. You can select the some name on the music library and drag it to the new play list. Batching dragging is available to save time.

4. Then on your new playlist, you can see all the songs you'd like to burn to CD. Just make sure that you don't add too many songs for a CD to hold. If you have, iTunes will ask you to prepare several CDs. If there are too many songs and you just want to burn a CD from iTunes, you need to delete some songs from the playlists by clicking the delete button. When this is done, you can insert a blank CD-R or CD-RW into your computer CD tray.

5. To burn the CD, you can right click the playlist and select "Burn Playlist to Disc" or click File > Burn Playlist to Disc. iTunes will then begin to burning the playlist to the blank disc. A window will pop up asking you what kind of CD you want to burn: Audio CD, Data CD or MP3 CD.

When you have selected all the wanted settings, you can just hit "Burn" to start the iTunes burning CD process. It will take about 4-8 minutes. Just wait for the burning process to be finished. When it is finished, you will get a nice music CD!

Tips: If you want to burn iTunes movies to DVD, you can refer to How to burn iTunes movies to DVD. If you get many videos, movies and songs bought from iTunes store and you want to remove the iTunes DRM so that you can easily share them with family and friends, you can turn to How to remove iTunes DRM.