Burning a CD
by Andy Rush

First, A Little History

The venerable CD, or Compact Disc, has been a part of the home audio consumer's life since 1982. It was a revolution in delivering extremely high quality audio recordings, at least in comparison to the audio tape and LP records that were available at the time. However, while the popularity of the LP record faded quite quickly, the audio tape industry continued to flourish. Why? Well because people were making copies of CDs onto audio tape. And if consumers were not making illegal copies of CDs, they were making their music available to use in their car tape players.

The CD-ROM, or data form of CD, was available to home computer users in 1985. The recordable version of CD-ROMs, the CD-Recordable (CD-R), wasn't introduced until 1988. At that time, the drives cost thousands of dollars and were large appliances. Blank discs cost $100. By the mid-1990's the cost of a CD-R drive had dropped considerably. They had dipped under $1000 dollars, and blank discs were around $8.00.

Look How Far We've Come

Pretty speedy CD-R drives are currently available (March 2003) for less than $50, and the blank media can be had for less than a quarter per disc. Most computers that are sold today are available with a CD recorder that is either included for free, or as an option for another $20 or so.

There are two types of blank media available. Blank CD-R discs are to be used essentially once. They have a capacity of 650-700 MB of data or about 75-80 minutes of audio. Once you fill the disc, that's it. No changing the data on the disc. CD re-writable discs (CD-RW) are reusable CDs. You can write to and erase from them thousands of times (at least theoretically).

One last question before we move on. Why is it called a CD "burner"? CD recorders use a type of laser to record the data onto the discs. The laser actually heats up one of the layers of the CD to encode the information. Hence, you burn a CD. The How Stuff Works web site has more info on CD Burning. The next section will discuss the many uses of a CD burner.