Create your own custom-made CD

Create your own custom-made CD

By Zatni Arbi

JAKARTA (JP): In my small collection of compact discs, which I
have been building for more than a decade, there are some really
great CDs and CD sets. Some of my favorite sets are the ones from
Reader's Digest Music and Time Life Music (yes, they produce
music recordings, too).

Unfortunately, as you already know, in a lot of CDs great
pieces like Rodger's and Hammerstein's Some Enchanted Evening and
Dvorak's Humoresque are placed among the first few tracks while
others that are not so great follow. Another CD may contain
Massenet's Meditation and Mendelssohn's Song Without Words, which
are superbly played on the violin, but the rest are just not as
captivating. Sometimes, another great piece such as Albeniz'
Tango may be buried toward the end of the platter, but before we
get to it we would have to put up with some tracks of mediocre
pieces.

In the past, the only solution would be to record our own
selection on a high grade cassette tape. Of course, we are not
supposed to sell these tapes or even give them away to our
friends and relatives. We may listen to them on our personal
bookshelf audio system-or car stereo to soothe our mind as we
battle our way through Jakarta's traffic.

Now that I have decided to buy the HP Pavilion 9850 that I
reviewed some time ago, I could not resist the temptation to try
to create my own custom-made CD. The Pavilion came with a CD-RW
drive and a DVD drive. Adaptec's Easy CD Creator was also
included, making the machine an ideal tool for mixing music in
one compact disc.

The whole operation turned out to be surprisingly simple. What
took most of my time and required a lot of mental work was
actually choosing the pieces that I liked best from my favorite
CDs.

Easy CD Creator can record tracks from a number of different
CDs, copy the entire content of a CD, extract an audio CD and
save it in a WAV file on the hard disk so that the computer can
play it back or we can digitally modify it. It can also extract
and create MP3 files from a CD. It can also save an image of the
entire CD, so that we can create multiple copies of the same CD
without having to let the computer read the original again.

As can be seen in the accompanying picture, the program has
three panes. The left shows all the drives and folders. When we
place a CD in the drive, the tracks would appear in the upper
right-hand pane. We can play any of the tracks by double clicking
on it. A CD player control panel will then appear. If we like the
track, we click on the Add button on the toolbar, and the track
will appear in the CD Layout pane at the bottom.

The CD Layout actually lists all the tracks that we want to
write on the new CD. As we add more tracks, the status bar at the
bottom will tell us approximately how much more space we will
have on the CD, indicated by the length of music that can be
stored.

We can also add new tracks in the CD Layout just by dragging
and dropping them from the CD track list. We can also change the
order in which the tracks appear in the CD Layout by dragging.
This order will be used by the program in writing the audio files
on the CD platter.

A track can also be previewed, provided the CD is still in the
driver. A click on the right mouse button will call up a menu,
which includes Preview.

Once we have approached the maximum limit of tracks that can
be recorded, we can begin the process.

Start burning

First, we need to put each of the source CDs into the drive.
The program is smart enough to know which tracks we want to be
recorded where. If the CD contains a piece that should be placed
on track No. 1, it will be written right away. If the next track
on the CD should be placed on track No. 4, while tracks two and
three are still empty, the program will just create an image on
the hard disk. Only when their turn comes the program will burn
them into the blank CD.

Each time a source CD has been read, the driver's tray will
come out and we will be prompted to insert the next source CD. We
just have to swap the source CDs until all the tracks are copied
either on to the blank CD or on to the hard disk. In my test,
once all source CDs had been read, it took the program a little
more than 30 minutes to create my custom CD, which contained 23
tracks with a duration of around 62 minutes.

The next step would have been to create a CD cover for the
jewel case and the CD label. The design program is part of Easy
CD Creator. If your PC is connected to the Internet, the program
can also access the CD Database (CDDB) music service
(www.cddb.com(, a huge database that contains lists of compact
discs titles, track names, artists and musicians, composers, etc.
With the help of these databases, we do not have to type in the
individual details of the tracks, provided that the CDs are
already included in the databases.

Once Easy CD Creator closes the writing session, the CD will
be ready for playback. My newly burned CD played without a glitch
on my cheap, made-in-Hong Kong VCD player. The sound quality,
contrary to all the theories that you hear in Mangga Dua and
Glodok, was the same as the original. I also used a cheap blank
CD under the Binn brand, which cost Rp 5,000 including the case.

However, if you record music on any medium, do keep in mind
that you must never use it for any commercial purpose. Even
recording a copyrighted material for personal use may be
categorized as falling into the gray area. The fact that it has
become so easy to copy CDs does not mean that it is a legal
activity.

Incidentally, as I finished this article, Antonin Dvorak's The
Song My Mother Taught Me was playing in the background.
(zatni@cbn.net.id)