My music travels far
October 20, 2007 12:02 AM   Subscribe

If I burn a CD on my Mac here in the U.S., will I have trouble listening to it on a friend's computer in Asia, Europe or the Caribbean?
posted by Kevin A to Technology (8 answers total)
 
How are you burning it. If you're converting a bunch of mp3's to CDA to make it CD format, it should play everywhere.
posted by sanka at 12:05 AM on October 20, 2007


More simply, if you can play it in a regular CD player, you can play it anywhere.
posted by alexei at 12:09 AM on October 20, 2007


No.
posted by Jerub at 12:42 AM on October 20, 2007


You may be confusing region coded DVD's with burning your own CD/DVD's. The region issue is only for retail purchased media that has this type of protection added (ostensibly to keep pricing separate by region).
posted by qwip at 1:16 AM on October 20, 2007


Be aware that if you use CD-RW format, some players won't work properly with it. For best compatibility, burn to CD-R.

Note that this will only give you 84 minutes of music per CD, if you use the extended size. And you will not gain any quality by doing this; if your sources are lossily compressed, burning to CD makes them no better, but increases their file size by 10x or more. Re-compressing back to the smaller form will induce more losses and make the track far less listenable.

If you have them in a lossy format, it's usually easiest to just burn them on a data CD, which will let you fit far, far more music on each disk. But then you have to install player software of some kind on the other end. (You can include iTunes and Winamp on one of your CDs.)
posted by Malor at 3:05 AM on October 20, 2007


Many, many CD players these days have MP3 players built in and are quite cheap. But since you are listening to it on a computer anyway, you will have zero problems and it is a much better idea to save it as a MP3 disc if you can.
posted by Deathalicious at 4:29 AM on October 20, 2007


Nope. CDs are an international format usually refered to as "Red Book." Things you have to worry about overseas is mostly video related as there are various DVD/VHS encodings (PAL, NTSC).
posted by damn dirty ape at 10:08 AM on October 20, 2007


Response by poster: Thanks everyone!
posted by Kevin A at 1:02 PM on October 20, 2007


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