Even if today multimedia resources, music, films, programs, video games and so on, can be enjoyed online, directly from the internet and even if it is now more convenient to use external hard disks, USB sticks and memory cards for save the data, it is not yet time to retire CDs, DVDs and recent Blue Ray. All computers have a CD DVD player with integrated burner and the desire to create music CDs with your favorite songs and create DVDs with your favorite TV series or films is still very much alive, perhaps even in high quality, thus avoiding buying Blue Ray, expensive and low-impact.
CDs and DVDs are also useful for saving data for a backup of your files, photos or private documents.
In this guide we see 15 ways to continue using the burner of your computer, to record CD and DVD discs and make it still a useful accessory, whether it is a new model of the type BlueRay player or dual layer discs, or that it only supports the CDs.
Premise: The recordable CDs are of the CD-R format or are those rewritable in the CD-RW format.
DVDs have different formats, DVD-R, DVD + R or DVD-RAM, rewritable or not.
Most recorders should support all formats, but sometimes only read and not write.
On another page you will find brief descriptions of the best free programs for burning CDs and DVDs ; for this article the ones that I have taken as the best programs are CDBurnerXP and DVDFlick .
1) Create a data disc with files, music or videos .
Data discs can include MP3 files or AVI files using the DivX or Xvid codec which can be played by Divx players.
A data disc can also contain file archives for a computer backup.
The precaution is to avoid long filenames that could create problems and to use the free CDBurnerXP program, which works with all burners and which is better than the famous Nero Burning rom.
2) Create Audio CD
An Audio CD is the traditional one, with the CDA tracks on the disc.
You can copy or create an audio CD from mp3 files using the CDBurnerXP program which is also in Italian.
After importing the tracks, perhaps converting the mp3s to Wav first (you can use the Foobar 2000 player) for better audio quality, you can choose a possible pause between one track and the other and burn.
If you find yourself with a single track, you can divide it with programs to cut music tracks and mp3 files.
3) CD Ripping
You can also extract the tracks of a CD with conversion into mp3 files to be saved on the computer as described in the linked article.
4) Burn a DVD
To create a DVD Video from an iAvi or Divx movie, you can use the DVDFlick program which is very easy to use and free.
For more information you can read how to convert a Divx video to DVD.
remember in this regard that the video format for high quality is MKV and that you can burn MKV videos to DVD .
5) Create an ISO boot disk
As seen several times, it is possible to create ISO images to save the contents of CDs and DVDs on the computer .
In the same way it is also possible to burn the ISO on a CD that is bootable or that can be used to start a computer.
Creating a boot disk from scratch means copying an operating system such as Linux or Windows that works "Live" ie without installation.
Programs like Unetbootin allow you to create live ISO of Linux systems, WinPE allows you to create live Windows CDs and so on.
Even the simple IMgBurn program allows you to create bootable CDs also starting from the file of a floppy disk (such as the boot files that can be downloaded from the bootdisk.com website).
ISO images saved on the computer can also be mounted with programs that simulate virtual cd players to open ISO files .
6) Create image of a Live CD for virtual pc with VMware Player
Using the VMware Player program you can create a new virtual machine, do not install any operating system and set the choice of system to " other ".
After saving the new virtual pc, you can go to the settings and choose to use an ISO image saved on the computer.
By clicking on the Play button, you should start the virtual pc with the live cd.
In this way you can make tests, before really burning the disc or using a live system without restarting the computer, directly from Windows.
See here where to download ISO images of various Linux systems.
7) Create labels to stick on the CD or DVD with the LightScribe
Direct Disc Labeling is a system that allows your CD / DVD burner to engrave labels on the surfaces of discs but it takes a burner compatible with this new technology that includes ink.
You burn the disc in a normal way, then flip it over in the player and run the LightScribe labeling program as explained in the guide.
8) Copying CDs, DVDs and Blu-Ray, even protected ones, may require the use of special programs which were discussed in another post.
9) Burn a disc and password protect it .
The easiest way to encrypt files on a CD or DVD disc that you record is to use the free program TrueCrypt, already explained in the article on how to protect USB sticks with a password.
When the program starts, select Create Volume, Create a file container, give a name and password to the protected file and create it.
This file is a kind of disk partition that can be viewed and used only if the correct password is entered.
This protected container can be burned to a CD normally, so you can read and use that CD only by mounting the file protected with TrueCrypt (which will be included on the CD), by entering the password.
10) Burn a dual-layer disc
Burning data onto a dual-layer disc (dual-layer, forward and backward) works much like creating a normal data disc.
It takes a burning program that supports the burning of double layer cd or dvd discs and the burner must support this type of disc.
If you want to create a video disc, you have to decide where to put the break between one layer and another because there will be a short pause at that point during playback on the computer.
The program to use is ImgBurn, choose Build mode, add the necessary files for the project, click on the "Burn" button, give the disk a name and wait for the ImgBurn instructions.
11) Burn a Blu-ray disc
To burn a Blu-ray disc, you must have a recordable Blu-ray disc and a burner capable of writing on it.
You must then use a program such as ImgBurn that supports writing to BlueRay discs.
While burning the BlueRay, on ImgBurn, select, from the options on the right, such as Data Type, "Data Type MODE1 / 2048", for the file system choose UDF and in the UDF Revision box choose 2.50.
You can also use DVDFlick to burn BlueRays which is perhaps more intuitive and easier.
12) Overburning of a standard CD / DVD
OverBurn means copying files by slightly exceeding the maximum disk capacity.
This time the program to use is CDBurnerXP, insert the disk you want to create and add the files or folders to be copied.
If the data size is larger than the disc size by a small amount, click on Burn and choose to Overburn when the warning appears indicating that there is no space on the CD or DVD.
If the disc is recorded correctly, check that each file has entered; It is clear that the smaller the verburn, the easier it is for everything to go well.
13) Read a damaged CD / DVD
Very often, CDs and DVDs are scratched, damaged or dirty a lot, especially if they are badly stored in dusty drawers.
To recover data from a CD you can use the ISOBuster program to extract that data from the CD and copy it to your computer.
Other programs for recovering files from an unreadable or damaged CD or DVD .
14) If the CD is damaged, you can try to repair scratched or damaged DVD CDs with some "grandmother" advice from different players.
15) Autorun or Autoplay of CDs or DVDs .
Many say they disable the autoplay of the CDs on the computer to avoid infecting it with viruses.
If that computer is not shared and used by other people and you have the updated antivirus, there is no reason to disable autoplay.
On Windows 7, in the Control Panel, in the Hardware and Sound section, we dare all the settings for the automatic execution of CDs and USB sticks.
