Burning Audio CDs

DART CD-Recorder Basic offers you a possibility to create and record your own audio CD or CD Text provided your system is equipped with a CD-R.

Before you begin the process of reading and writing audio CDs, it is recommended that you assign which of the CD drives installed in your PC will perform either reading and/or writing duties in the CD-Recorder Basic utility.

Click on the View/Options/Devices menu.

Assign the Default CD Recorder device from the available pull-down menu. This will be the CD drive that will be used to write ("burn") your new audio CDs.

Assign the Default CD Reader device from the available pull-down menu. This will be the CD drive that will be used to read ("rip") audio CD tracks to the hard drive.

Assign the CD Reader drive letter, which must be the drive letter of the currently selected Default CD Reader device (above).

Selecting audio files for recording

Prior to recording you must specify which files (and in what order) should be placed on a CD. This can be done by creating a playlist of soundfiles. Instructions on how to create a playlist can be found at How to create a new playlist.

DART CD-Recorder Basic creates CDs in a standard audio format which can be read by every CD player. For this reason the playlist items must obey several standard restrictions:

1. The playlist must consist of at least one but not more than 99 soundfiles.

2. Each soundfile has to be at least 4 seconds long.

3. Soundfiles must be CD format compatible.

Since DART CD-Recorder Basic provides automatic audio file conversion you do not have to worry about the last requirement.

Adjusting silence gaps between audio tracks

DART CD-Recorder Basic allows you to individually adjust silence gaps between consecutive CD tracks. In order to do this, follow the steps below:

1. Click the playlist item using the right mouse button and select the Info command (or double-click the item) to evoke the File info dialog.

2. Modify the value displayed in the edit box entitled "Gap time after this track in seconds" (anything between 0 and 30 seconds).

3. If you want this time to be identical for all tracks, click the Apply to all button.

4. Click OK.

Each silence gap is attached to the soundfile it was defined for (always the one preceding the gap). Therefore if you change position of an audio file within the list the corresponding silence gap will move along with the file.

To help you adjust spacing between subsequent tracks, the actual size of silence gaps is retained when a particular item or all items on the playlist are played back.

Writing to a CD

When you are ready to record your CD, make sure you have a new, unformatted CD-R or CD-RW blank CD ready and insert it into your assigned Default CD-Recorder drive (from Step 1).

Note: We recommend using only CD-R media, due to a greater compatibility with consumer audio CD players. You will only want to use CD-RW media when burning CDs that you know will be played on CD-RW compatible audio CD players.

Click the WRITE TO AUDIO CD button on the toolbar or select the Write to audio CD command from the List menu.

WRITE TO AUDIO CD button

If any of the files in the playlist require conversion to the CD format (16 bit, 44kHz, stereo), a Check CD format dialog appears on the screen. Prior to recording, DART CD-Recorder Basic checks all items on the playlist and runs a CD format conversion procedure if necessary. The results of soundfile conversion are saved in temporary files - the Check CD format dialog allows you to estimate the amount of disc space needed to perform such conversion and to select the temporary directory.

If any file conversion is necessary, it is performed on the selected playlist items. When conversion is finished, the Write dialog appears on the screen. The settings in this window allow you to control:

The device used for CD recording (which is useful if your system is equipped with more than one CD-R or CD-RW drive).

The speed at which your CD will be written ("burned"). Note that the list of speeds provided are given to us by your CD-R or CD-RW drive as supported speeds for audio CD creation.

To enable any of the following other three options (below), click on the associated checkbox in the Write window.

The Simulate disc creation option, which will check whether your system is capable of recording with a given speed (all actions will be identical with those taken during actual recording, except that no data will be written to a CD). If you use this option, you'll have to perform the write process again, removing this option, to complete your audio CD.

The Write CD Text information option, which will write any available CD+Text information, for files in your playlist, to your new audio CD. If you didn't "read" this information from an existing audio CD, you may have to add it to our playlist by hand. To get more information on this feature of our software, click the help line below.

Using CD Text

The Enable BURN-Proof option, available only when using Plextor or Plextor-based CD burner drives, offers protection from recording errors at the expense of write speed. To learn more about the BURN-Proof solution, click the help line below.

Using BURN-Proof mode

To start recording your CD, press the Write button.