Comments on: My music travels far

Question: My music travels far

Kevin A — Sat, 20 Oct 2007 00:02:17 -0800

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?

By: sanka

sanka — Sat, 20 Oct 2007 00:05:41 -0800

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.

By: alexei

alexei — Sat, 20 Oct 2007 00:09:19 -0800

More simply, if you can play it in a regular CD player, you can play it anywhere.

By: Jerub

Jerub — Sat, 20 Oct 2007 00:42:14 -0800

No.

By: qwip

qwip — Sat, 20 Oct 2007 01:16:41 -0800

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).

By: Malor

Malor — Sat, 20 Oct 2007 03:05:58 -0800

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.)

By: Deathalicious

Deathalicious — Sat, 20 Oct 2007 04:29:54 -0800

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.

By: damn dirty ape

damn dirty ape — Sat, 20 Oct 2007 10:08:08 -0800

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).

By: Kevin A

Kevin A — Sat, 20 Oct 2007 13:02:35 -0800

Thanks everyone!