How to Make your Own Compilations on CD
I have a love of music. I love obscure music. I sometimes have a tough time finding the exact music I want on CD. You are going to have to read between the lines on some of this, because I certainly wouldn't want to encourage illegal behavior, but you can use this knowledge to many CD making endeavors. Understood?
I obtain the music through whatever methods that are at my disposal. I usually create a directory of just what I want on the CD. I use winamp to convert the files into a wave for ease in burning. If you don't know how to do this, let me explain it real quick: What you do is go to preferences, choose the audio out to Diskwriter. Now when you play your mp3's, it will create a file instead of playing over your speakers. You can tweak the audio slightly with this method, which I use a slight level adjustment plug-in so the audio files are consistent in volume.
Now that you have the music in your winamp, in the order that you want, I create a playlist using the misc. options/generate HTML playlist. I save this file to use later as a track listing for the CD.
I
burn the CD in the order that I had in winamp, which numbers the tracks from one on up in
the order it had converted the files.
So far, most of this is the common knowledge, or you have this method down. The cover and packaging of the CD is where the art comes into play.
I use Ifranview as my basic graphic viewing program; it is small, free, and powerful. I have assigned this program a shortcut key, which you can do by double-clicking the icon, going to properties, and assigning it a key where you can using a three key combination, start the program from anywhere. I bring this up, because without the shortcut key, you will be doing quite a bit of clicking on the icon.
I go to All-Music Guide and get either an album description, a biography, or review to use as inside liner notes. There are two ways of using this. You can copy the text and drop it into a word processing program, formatting how you choose, or you can take a snapshot of the text, making a photo-copy of the material. To do this, what you would do is hit the print screen button on your computer. If you can see the entire review, you should increase the resolution of your screen so you can. If it is still too big, then you will have to do option one.
Open Ifranview, and hit paste (or control-v). Here is the snapshot you made. Outline only the part of the text you want to act as your liner notes, and hit crop (or control-y). Now save the image somewhere.
If you are copying text and you want to remove all of their underlined links, etc, I would suggest pasting the text into notepad first, then recopying into your word processor.
What do you do now that you have the text in your word processor? Well, you do the same thing that you would have done if you had hit print-screen... you will be making a graphic file of this. Go to print preview, and see the entire text you will be using as your liner notes. If it won't fit, I would suggest using a smaller font, or increasing the resolution of your screen. Now, when you have all the text on your monitor, hit print screen, and follow the directions above of pasting and cropping using Ifranview (or whatever graphic program you want to use).
With track listings, I get rid of the artist names, using the replace function in my word processor. I replace it with nothing, so it actually will end up deleting the artist name, leaving me only with song title and track time. I also select the text and change it to Title Case, which is another function in my word processor, and adds a touch of uniformity which is lacking in files sometimes.
So we have the liner notes and the track listing as graphic files. We now need a cover. If you want to use a pre-existing picture, you can search the web, grab the picture at All-Music, or perhaps at Amazon. There are other sites that have album covers, check it out at Mega-Search. When you click on the picture at Amazon, you can right click and save the picture, and my suggestion is to name it something else plus .jpg at the end of it; Amazon has lots of periods in its' pictures, and programs get confused by that.
If you are making your own cover, grab a picture that you like, save it as a .bmp file using your graphics program, then open Paint, which comes in windows. Highlight the area you want the title to appear, play around, and get it the way you like it. Save the front cover.
Once you have all three, use the program CoverXP, which will take any graphics file and size it to the dimensions of a CD. There is an option for Tray Card with Customized Borders; use this to make the title appear on the edge of tray card.
You now have a very nice looking CD, with liner notes, track listing, and a nifty cover. I have made compilations, mixes, etc. all laid out very nice, with no investment but time.
