In: Root » Computers and technology » Windows XP » Understanding CDs and CDRWs
There are two types of writeable CDs: - CD-R is short for CD read. This is a CD that you can write once. After a CD-R has been written, you cannot add to it or erase it. A CD-R writer can write only CD-Rs. A CD-RW writer generally can write either CD-Rs or CD-RWs. - CD-RW is short for CD read-write. This is a CD that you can erase and rewrite many times. You generally can play a CD-R on a conventional CD player or on a computer’s CD-ROM drive (or a CD-R drive, or a CD-RW drive). As a rule, only a computer’s CD-ROM drive can play a CD-RW. WMP cannot add data to a partially recorded CD-RW. Before you can reuse a CD-RW, you must erase it, like this: 1. Put the CD-RW in the CD writer. 2. Choose Start -> My Computer. 3. Select the CD writer. 4. Click Erase CD-RW. Burning a CD In this section, “CD” refers to both CD-Rs and CD-RWs. The process of writing data to a CD is called burning. WMP enables you to burn a CD very, very easily. Here’s how: 1. Choose Start -> Windows Media Player to start Windows Media Player. (If for some reason WMP isn’t visible when you click Start, use Start -> All Programs -> Windows Media Player.) 2. Click the Copy to CD or Device button. The left pane of the window, Music to Copy, shows the tracks currently available to copy to the CD. 3. If the left pane is not empty, select all of the tracks and delete them. This deletes the tracks only from the window not from the Media Library. The right pane of the window, Music on Device, shows the device to which Windows Media Play is set to copy, and what is on the device. Your CD writer should be shown in the drop-down list at the top of the pane. 4. If your CD writer is not shown in the list, click the drop-down list and select it. 5. Select the tracks that you want to copy to the CD. Start by clicking the Media Library tab. 6. To copy an individual track, display the track that you want in the right pane of the window. Then right-click the track and click Copy to Audio CD. WMP returns to the Copy to CD or Device window and displays the track in the Music to Copy pane. 7. To copy another track, return to the Media Library and do it again. 8. To copy several tracks at once from a playlist, display the contents of the playlist in the Media Library’s right pane. Select the tracks with either Shift+click or Ctrl+click, and then right-click any one of the selected tracks and choose Copy to Audio CD. 9. After you collect all of the tracks that you want to copy to the CD, consider the order of the tracks. WMP records them on the CD in the order that they appear in the Music to Copy pane. If that isn’t what you want, drag each track to the desired position. If you see a track in the Music to Copy pane that you don’t want to copy, you can delete it from the pane, or you can clear the check box to its left. Only items whose check boxes are selected will be copied. 10.Put a blank CD in the CD writer and close the door. Wait a few seconds, and the message Copy . . . to drive appears above the Music to Copy pane. 11.Look at each track’s status, shown in the Status column. All statuses should say “Ready to copy.” If some say “Will not fit,” the total play time of the tracks is greater than the recording capacity of the disc. If you write the CD anyway, the tracks that will not fit will not be copied to it. You probably want to remove some tracks so that the whole list will fit. 12.Click the Copy Music button, above the Music on Device pane, to begin the copying operation. WMP makes two passes through the list of tracks to copy. In the first pass, it prepares each track for copying and changes the track’s status from “Ready to copy” to “Converted.” In the second pass, it writes the tracks to the CD and changes each track’s status to “Copying to CD” and then to “Complete” when it is done. 13.When the last track’s status changes to “Complete,” the CD is done, and WMP ejects it from the drive. The copying process takes a substantial fraction of the time it would take to play the copied tracks, the exact time depending on the speed of your CD writer. It is best not to use your computer for other tasks while writing a CD. If another task’s activity prevents WMP from writing a continuous stream of data, the CD will be spoiled. When you copy an entire playlist to the Music to Copy pane in this way, you are copying the playlist itself not the tracks in the playlist. If you then delete a track from the Music to Copy pane, that track will be deleted from the playlist! Copying to a digital audio player The “Device” in “Copy to CD or Device” refers to a digital audio player: one of those nifty little gadgets that you can carry around with you and use to play music out of electronic memory. People will forgive you if you call it an MP3 player. The folks at Microsoft call it that. Here’s how to get your tunes onto your MP3 player: 1. Attach your player to one of your computer’s USB ports and turn it on. 2. Select WMP’s Copy to CD or Device tab. 3. If your player is not selected in the Music on Device pane’s dropdown list, click the list and select it. If you click the list and don’t see your device there, a couple of things could be wrong: - WMP may not have noticed that you have attached the player to the computer. To fix this problem, quit and restart WMP. - Windows XP may not support your particular player. To fix this problem, you may need a new bank account. The rest of the copying process is essentially the same as burning a CD, which I discussed in the preceding section: Build a list of tracks in the Music to Copy pane, click the Copy Music button, and wait for the process to complete. Some differences in the process reflect differences between a digital audio player and a CD writer: - You can add tracks to a digital audio player that already has tracks stored on it. - You can delete tracks from your digital audio player. To delete a track, click the track and then click the button labeled with an “X” at the top of the Music on Device pane. Lights! Action! Windows Movie Maker Windows Movie Maker brings a full-featured video-editing workshop to your PC. You can use it to create anything from a few seconds of action say, to dress up an e-mail message to a full-length documentary about your kid’s first birthday party. Get the sound synchronization right, and you could even toss together a decent music video, sell it to Hollywood, and turn into an overnight sensation. Just remember where you got the idea, huh? Windows Movie Maker isn’t going to drive George Lucas out of business any time soon, and it’s definitely still an “in progress” application. You don’t want to bet your company or your reputation on it. But for casual stitching together of home movies, it works great. What You Need to Create Movies Moviemaking requires a lot of hardware. Obviously, you need some type of video camera. But you need a lot of computer, too. Microsoft recommends the following as a minimum: - A 300 MHz Pentium II or equivalent - At least 64MB of RAM - A sound card or equivalent hardware on your computer’s main board - At least 2GB of free space on the hard drive Depending on the type of video camera you have, you may also need a special kind of video card to pull recorded video into your computer. If you’re going with a full-fledged digital video camera, with direct feed into your PC, plan on using at least a 600 MHz Pentium, with 128MB of memory, and acres (and acres) of free hard drive space. Video goes through disk space like Orville Redenbacher goes through corn. |
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