Article updated on January 24, 2021 by Byothe
When you choose to burn a CD (for those who still do) you can either burn it as a data disc or burn it as an audio CD. A data disc can hold up to 700MB of data, while an audio CD can hold 80 minutes of audio. If you have 200MB of MP3 files that correspond to 3 hours of music you can still only burn 80 minutes onto the disc… But why?
What happens when you burn a data CD
When burning, you choose the format of your CD based on what your burning software offers.
Data CDs are easy to understand. When you choose this format to store MP3s or any other type of files, your computer creates a disc that contains all of these files. The files on the disc are therefore the same size as the originals on your hard drive. So if you burn 200MB of MP3s to a data disc, you will still have room to burn 500MB of other files.
What is different in an audio CD?
Burning an audio CD is a little different. Audio CDs don’t work the same way as data CDs…and they don’t contain MP3s.
An audio CD contains audio data in CDDA format (Compact Disc Digital Audio). This is an uncompressed audio format and therefore takes up much more space than an MP3 file or any other compressed audio format (AAC for example). One minute of a CDDA file always takes up the same space on a disc, which explains why the maximum number of minutes you can burn on an audio disc does not change.
So even if you want to burn MP3 files to disc, they will be converted to CDDA so that they can play on a standard CD player (some players are able to play MP3 files directly).
Obviously the opposite is also true, if you convert a commercially purchased audio CD to MP3 you will get files that are less than 700MB (when you add them up). In order to convert CDDA files to MP3, your computer uses a compression process that will eliminate data and deteriorate the sound quality.
So that's why burning MP3s to a CD won't match the quality of the original CD... but if you're happy with the quality of the MP3, you won't be disappointed!
In short, to summarize and conclude, when you burn MP3s to make an audio CD usable in all CD players, they are converted to the standard CDDA format, which takes up more disk space and with this format, 1 minute of music always takes up the same space... so with the 700MB of your audio CDs, you can only burn 80 minutes of music! QED!
For my part, since the advent of the iPod and then the iPhone, it's been a long time since I burned a CD! And you, does it still happen to you?
Are there still people who burn CDs???
Yes, I still burn CDs. The Hi-Res FLACs that I listen to at home are burned for my car.