Nero

Using Nero, The CD writing program

One of the joys of using a computer today is having a CD-writer onboard.

This allows you to do a variety of tasks that a few years ago would have been out of reach of most people. Nowadays a fast writer will cost you approx..£60.

A lot of newcomers find difficulty in using their writer, so I’ll do a quick run down on how to create a music CD.

For this article, I’ll use Nero, which is one of the more popular CD writing programs around.

Nero came with my Liteon CD/Rw drive. As you can see from the grab above, it shows it as bundled.

Once Nero is installed you’re ready to go. You can always look in the preferences of the program if you feel confident about playing about with the settings. I’ll show some grabs of the preferences, but, in the main, I’ve left them at the defaults.

The defaults mean that the program is ready to go once installed and I believe you should only alter them if you really know what you are doing!!!

Ok, first screen. Alter the times if you wish for warnings on how full the CD is.

Let’s have a check at what plugins are installed. As you can see, I’ve got MP3Pro installed as well.

I’m safe, I’ve no unsupported plugins installed………..and I doubt you will have either. So, no point in having a grab of that bit .

You can alter where you wish Nero to cache its temp files…..make sure if you alter this that you have enough space to handle them.

Yup, even though I tend to mangle it, I use English.

I’ve stuck with the default sounds, though you can uncheck them if you don’t want disturbed by the noise.

I’ve left most of these at the defaults as well, I really don’t see much need to alter them. However, if you really don’t want to confirm deletes etc, uncheck them. It’s quite easy to click on a wrong file, however, so you could end up losing something you didn’t want to.

The buffer should be left alone unless you know what you’re doing!!!

Again, Nero tends to give helpful hints on the displays.

Again……left at default. Leaving it at defaults means that if you put an audio CD in the drive (say you’ve got two drives) and drag a song onto the display , it can look up the title and automatically name it for you.

Nero automatically ejects the CD after burning it, you can alter this behavior as well…….

Overburning, again, is for experts. If you must alter this, you may end up with a lot of Frisbees.

Ok, that’s a very fast look at the preferences, there are a helluva lot more things to alter in this program. One of the many reasons its so popular.

Back to the normal browser window.

Click on the new compilation icon……shown highlighted

This brings up the wizard………

Nice and easy……….

Decide what you want to do……I want an audio CD……

D’Oh! Not only does it show you the burn icon…..it even tells you where it is.

Making your compilation is a simple matter of dragging tracks , whether they be in Wav, Mp3, etc onto the audio1 window.

Keep doing this until you have all the tracks you want or you have exhausted the space on the CD you are going to burn. The line at the bottom tells you how much time your compilation is going to play for.

That’s the really simple method done, more or less, it just remains to press the burn icon.

I use just the Burn option ……I don’t (usually) create coasters, so I don’t bother testing the compilation.

There, that was very easy……..

As I said, Nero is a wonderful program, nice and easy to use for beginners.

But, it can do a whole lot more.

Again, this is very graphic intensive, but I may as well show you some more of the options you can use.

We made our compilation, but just suppose………

we downloaded most of these songs.

They’ve come from various sources and the volumes of the songs are all different. You don’t want to constantly fiddle with the controls while you’re listening to your Cd, so what can we do to rectify that?

Lets go back to the main display.

Right click on one of the songs………and select properties.

Here you can alter the pause between tracks……

In the indexes part, you can alter where you want the track to be read as the start e.g. a live track with speech at the start.

Filters…………

Read the part describing normalise……..ring any bells?

Yup, Nero can do an awful lot to help make your compilation sound great.

And that’s the easy part!!!

If you remember, you selected properties by right clicking on the file in the compilation……..lets try selecting audio editor instead……..

Wowsers, this should keep you busy for a while trying out everything on this!!

From here you can equalise the song…….

You thought the song could use more bass and treble……..why not give it some, then?

How about noise reduction……….

Chorus……..

You can much of anything to your song in this part of the program…….in fact, you could end up staying in this part for days, rather than just burning a compilation to listen to.

Nero’s audio editor is a multi featured program in its own right. Most people using Nero don’t bother either reading or trying out some of its options. Hopefully, this has shown some things you didn’t know about Nero.

If you only want to burn a compilation…………..use the simple method, but if you want more out of the compilation, be prepared to wade through all the options until you find what you want to do…….and how to do it.

Enjoy!!!

By Ian Urie
PC Technical Editor