How long to dupe digital sound to CD?

John McClung · Post by **John McClung** » 5 Jul 2006 9:36 pm

Question for you sound experts, thanks in advance:

I'm upgrading my home Mac soon, and would like to record steel lessons I give digitally (to Garage Band, or some other suitable app), then burn them to CD.

Assuming a lesson is an hour in length, how long would the burning process take on, say, a 48x CD-R burner? Is there a way to compress the sound files to make the process really quick?

I'd ideally like to burn the CD while the student packs up, then hand it off when he/she leaves.

I've seen special Tascam units you can burn directly, but I don't want to buy a very specialized piece of hardware for this minor purpose.

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E9 lessons
Mullen D-12/Carter SD-10/Webb amp/Profex II+Lexicon MPX-110 OR Line 6 Pod XT

Will Holtz · Post by **Will Holtz** » 5 Jul 2006 10:25 pm

a 48x burner should be able to burn an hour lesson in 60/48=1.25 minutes. Granted it will probably take a little longer than that given that the disk has to get up to speed. Probably 2 minutes.

If you get an audio recording program that can record directly to mp3 on the fly, then you can probably cut the file size down by a factor of 10. That might realistically burn in 30 seconds.

Jack Stoner · Post by **Jack Stoner** » 6 Jul 2006 2:12 am

If you save the audio file as an MP3, it will be compressed. You can then burn a "data" CD with the MP3 file. At 48X it would be approx 5 mins (plus or minus) to burn the CD.

They would have to play it back on a PC or a CD (or DVD) player that is MP3 capable.

One thing to consider on an audio CD is the burn speed. Many audio CD players will not play regular "audio" CD's burned at high speed. A PC will play them but many audio players will have problems with the high burn speed and anything over about 12X. At 12X that will lengthen the burning time, probably to around 8 minutes or a little less at 12X.

I don't remember exactly, but I've got some live show CD's that are around an hour each and I think it takes about 7 or 8 minutes to burn one at 8X with Nero.

Steinar Gregertsen · Post by **Steinar Gregertsen** » 6 Jul 2006 2:13 am

I never burn audio CDs faster than 8x, higher speeds may cause playback problems on some players.

Steinar

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"Play to express, not to impress"
www.gregertsen.com
Southern Moon Northern Lights

[This message was edited by Steinar Gregertsen on 06 July 2006 at 03:15 AM.]

Jack Stoner · Post by **Jack Stoner** » 6 Jul 2006 12:29 pm

Update. I had to make some audio CD's today. I use Nero and burned them at 8X (my audio cd "standard").

Disk 1, 55 min, burn time 7 min 38 sec.
Disk 2, 75 min, burn time 10 min 25 sec.[This message was edited by Jack Stoner on 06 July 2006 at 03:07 PM.]

John McClung · Post by **John McClung** » 8 Jul 2006 8:57 am

Thanks for all the welcome expertise, gentlemen. Very helpful.

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E9 lessons
Mullen D-12/Carter SD-10/Webb amp/Profex II+Lexicon MPX-110 OR Line 6 Pod XT