Recording and Writing Audio CDs using Musicmatch

a. Copying songs from an audio CD using MusicMatch. (Any version of Windows)

1. Install and launch MusicMatch.  (See the instructions in "How to install the software").\

2. Insert an audio CD into the computer's CD-ROM drive. If your computer is online at this time, the program will automatically look up the song titles in the Internet CD DataBase (CDDB). (If that particular CD is not in the CDDB, or if the CDDB is not working at the time you do this, the tracks will be titled simply Track 01, Track 02, etc, but you can re-name them later).

3. If the disk starts playing, click the square blue "stop" button to stop it.

4. If the RECORDER panel is not showing below the main MusicMatch window, click the red round button.

5. The Recorder window will display the artist name and album name on the left side; click on these to edit them. MusicMatch uses these names to create folders to save the recorded music files in.  Only the tracks checked will be recorded; so you can un-check any that you don't want to record. 

6. Click on the red round button on the recorder panel to begin recording. You will not hear the music while it records, because the program spins the CD really fast.  Recording a CD takes much less time than playing the CD normally. 

7. Once the recording is complete, each selected track on the CD will have been saved in MP3 format into a folder in "My Documents" --> "My Music". The files will be in folders that MusicMatch automatically creates and names for each album that you record. You may re-name the folders if you like after the fact. To print a track list, right-click the playlist window and select Pint Playlist(s). Close MusicMatch when you have recorded everything you want

b.  Using MusicMatch to burn a custom audio CD from your previously-copied music tracks.   (Note: to do this you must have a CD-writer on your PC). 

1. Open MusicMatch. Click the Burn button at the bottom of the playlist window to bring up the Burner window.

2. Click the button that has a musical note on it if you are making a regular audio CD, or the MP3 icon to make an MP3 disk.

3. Click the Explorer button at the top of the Burn0er window.  Click on the + sign to the left of  the My Music folder to display all the albums that have been recorded.  Click on any album to display its music tracks.

4. Drag the desired music tracks onto the Burner. You can add tracks from many albums.

5. To rearrange the order of the tracks, just drag and drop the titles within the Burner window.

6. The green bar at the bottom of the window tells you how much room you have left on the disk. If it's red it means that you have too many files; right-click and select Remove file to remove a track from the burner list.

7. Insert a blank CD-R disk into the CD-R drive (do not use a CD-RW disk) and click the Burn button to begin burning. This may take several minutes. When it is finished, the CD will be ejected.  Remove your CD and apply one of the round labels provided, using the round plastic alignment tool..  (The full version of MusicMatch can also print out both CD labels and jewel-case inserts complete with a list of tracks and song titles).

8. Click Return to Burner Plus.
(c) Tom O'Haver (toh@umd.edu), March 2004