This is how to burn your audio book downloads to CD that you can play in any ordinary CD player such as a home HiFi, car stereo or CD Walkman. While it's very easy to download your favourite titles from the web, your computer may not be the most convenient place to listen to them. You might want to put them on your HiFi, or take them on the road with you to listen to on the daily commute, in your lunch break, or on an intercontinental flight.

Click here to watch the video

Please note: To play this video, you will need Adobe Flash Player. If you do not have this already

installed on your computer, you may install it free from www.adobe.com

You can use pretty much any disc burning software out there. For example: Windows Media Player. Most people already have it as part of their Microsoft Windows installation and it's free. One word of caution before you start the CD burning process - you must open the audio book on your computer at least once to authenticate the licence before you burn it to CD. This effectively licences the audio book to you and gives you permission to burn the audio book to CD. It's a piece of cake! If you've never opened the audio book before, a screen will appear asking for your username and password. You just enter the data and then close the file again. You needn't listen all the way through. Additionally, if the book is split into more than one file, you only have to listen to the first one.

So to add it to your burn list. Rightclick the file in the folder where you've saved it and this time choose ‘Add to burn list'. Windows Media Player opens again and you can see the running time in the lower right hand corner.

You need to check the audio will fit on a standard audio CD. For example a file that is 1hour 11minutes will fit, which is a total of 71 minutes. A standard CD can hold 74 minutes of audio, so can be used with no problems. To be on the safe side, you might want to buy slightly larger capacity discs. If you want to burn several short titles onto a single disc, just repeat the process of right-clicking them and choosing ‘add to burn list'. As long as your total running time is shorter than your total disc capacity, you'll have no trouble fitting your files onto CD.

When you're ready, start the CD burning process by clicking the ‘Start Burn' button on Windows Media Player. Just to be on the safe side, take a look at the Start Burn button's drop-down list (click on the black arrow just to it's right). Here you can specify that it's an audio CD that you're creating.

The procedure is slightly different for Windows 2000 users. Just launch Windows Media Player and open your file. Right-click on the file in your playlist and choose ‘Copy to CD or Device'. Repeat this for as many files as you wish to burn. Next click the ‘Copy to CD or Device' tab on the left and make sure the files you want are checked - paying attention to the length. Then just click the Copy button.