Help How do i take a bunch of FLAC files and burn to a CD

[chipchart111]

Help How do i take a bunch of FLAC files and burn to a CD , do i burn the file to disk and then burn a cd, or can I burn straight to cd?
thanks

[AJM55]

I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm wrong, but I think a CD isn't large enough to accomodate FLAC files, plus I'm not even sure if a CD reader is capable of recognising FLACS. I always convert my FLAC files before burning them to CD.

[garym]

CD Burners all work essentially the same way. They take a digital file (FLAC, mp3, AAC, wav, etc.) and typically internally convert it to PCM format and burn the selected files to the CD (all at once). The only issue is whether the PCM files in total will fit on the audio CD.

What CD burner program are you planning to use. dbpoweramp is a CD ripper program (extracts files from CD to create digital versions rather than BURNING to a CD)

[schmidj]

A little clarification to Gary's reply. CDs burnt/pressed as "red book" CDs have basically a long string of PCM encoded from beginning to end with a certain amount of redundancy in the data to allow some (not that much) recovery from bad data. Interleaved with that data is some metadata (often called the TOC) telling your CD player/ripper where in this long string each track begins and ends (and in the case of a player, even where indexes in the middle of the track are located. Unfortunately, particularly for classical music where it might be very useful, indexes were rarely implemented by consumer player manufacturers and even more rarely used by the producers of CDs. And AFAIK, no cd ripping software can use indexes, and therefore no file player can use them to locate parts of a track.) And, in the case of Cd's with CD Text, there is additional metadata included in the TOC data which may include track titles and artists, at least a little part of the metadata we like to include with our ripped CDs.

Most of the metadata we see provided by rippers or players does not come from the physical CD at all, but from one or another website which provide, possibly by subscription or more commonly for "free" databases of the metadata on millions of tracks that have been recorded on CDs. The methods which rippers or other software use to relate the database metadata to the particular track from a CD and the content of the databases are relatively inaccurate at best, both in their content (often crowd sourced) and particularly in the algorithm used to select the particular database metadata which may be displayed or saved with the track content. If you are serious about your collection and the accuracy of the metadata displayed with the tracks, you will probably soon discover that metadata accuracy is the biggest issue and time consumer in transferring CD content to your library.

But storing tracks of content such as music on the physical media of A CD or DVD is not the only thing that can be done. The media can also be used to store files such as mp3's, AAC, FLAC or WAV, JPGs, or computer software. Much more common on DVD media than CD, because of the much larger storage capacity, but not uncommon as "orange book" CDs with extra features besides just the (mostly music) tracks. Not at all uncommon on DVD media where it often was used to distribute software for loading onto PCs. (more often nowadays done from websites) but also regularly used by individuals to record files onto (mostly) DVD media for backup or distribution to others.

Early CD burners were quite particular as to what format data (music) file they would burn onto a CD. 16 bit 44.1K sample rate WAV file. that was it. Then "better" burning software began to include sample rate converters of varying quality and bit depth truncators that may or may not have included the dithering necessary to avoid audible quantization noise. As bitrate reduced (a better therm than compressed) audio formats such as mp3, aac or FLAC became common, some burning software included software to convert the input file to the PCM (basically similar to WAV) data actually burned onto the CDR. In such software, lossless audio files will sort of remain lossless on the burnt CD, only loosing the quality of a possible sample rate conversion (Audio CDs are al burnt using a sample rate of 44.1 Kb per second) and any bit depth correction and how well that was done. Burning tracks previously converted to mp3, aac or other lossy compression schemes will not restore the quality lost in the bit rate conversion but may actually reduce the perceived quality more, depending on the quality of the software used to convert the lossy file back to PCM data necessary to create a CD.

This is the somewhat lengthy expansion on Gary's answer. If I've misstated anything here, bring it to my attention.