A long time ago if you wanted to have your favorite band's CD, you had to buy it from your record
store or buy it online. A lot of CD's cost around $10. If you were someone who just couldn't afford
to buy all the CDs you wanted, you would just wait until they played it on the radio.
Then came those music shareware sites like Napster that made it really easy and cheap to download
your favorite songs. You just store the songs on the computer's hard drive and add it to your MP3
player if you wanted.
If you wanted to transfer your downloaded files to a CD, all you needed was a CD burner which now
comes will all new computers.
A CD burner can come in two forms, external and internal. The external ones don?t even need to be
connected to your CPU and you only need a USB port to connect it to your computer. The internal CD
burner that most people may be familiar with is connected to you CPU and lives inside your computer
tower.
You may think you can only burn songs from your hard drive to your CD but this isn't true. Your CD
burner will copy another CD also. If your friend has a CD you've been wanting, just borrow it and
copy their CD to yours. What a great technology!
For a CD burner to work, you need software to run it. Most computers will come with software like
Windows Media Player but if you want good quality software, you can buy Nero or Roxio which burns
just the same as your free Windows Media player but they just offer more options and flexibility.
If you prefer to stick with the free options, you can download free burner software from the
Internet. Some good free options to look for are Deep Burner and ISO Recorder.
You might think a CD burner is only capable of copying the songs you downloaded but you can also
copy other files. You can just as easily burn other files, videos, mp3s, pictures, etc. Just think
how we ever managed to live without this great technology.
