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)