How to Put More Songs on a CD Than Normal

By Stephen Lilley

Updated February 10, 2017

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A standard audio CD can hold about 80 minutes worth of music. This is great if you're making a copy of a specific album or are taking a short car ride, but can be very prohibitive under other circumstances. Luckily, there is a way to fit a lot more music onto a standard CD than normal—burn them to an "MP3" CD. Now, instead of only 80 minutes worth of music you can fit 800MB worth of MP3 files on one CD.

Insert a blank CD in your computer's CD burner. Press the "Eject" button on the outside of the CD burner to close the disc tray.

Open your CD burning program. This can be a program like Apple's iTunes or Microsoft's Windows Media Player. Whichever program you already use to burn CDs will work fine.

Select "New Disc" from the "File" menu. Note that certain programs may operate a little differently, so if you're using a program that does not have a "New Disc" option in the file menu do whatever it is you need to do to start a new compilation.

Select "MP3 CD" from the list of available options. An "Audio CD" is the type you normally burn that can fit 80 minutes of music. A "Data CD" is a CD that will only work on other computers. An "MP3 CD" is the type that allows you to burn 800MB worth of music on a single CD. Note that in order to play this type of CD on your car or home stereo, the device itself must support "MP3 CDs."

Add all of the songs you want to burn to disc into the "Burn List" on your CD burning program.

Click "Burn" to write your selected songs to the blank CD in your computer's CD burner. When the process is finished your new MP3 CD will be complete and you can play it on any CD player that supports the MP3 file format.

Items you will need

  • CD Burner

  • Blank CD

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