Make a custom mix CD

Creating a custom mix of music for yourself or your friends is a long-standing tradition most music fans have tried at least once.

Thanks to today's crop of powerful computers, superfast burners, and user-friendly software, making a good-sounding mix is a simpler affair now than it was even five years ago. The right mix CD can certainly save a dying party, but it's also a great gift that includes a bit of your own personality. Birthdays and Valentine's Day are always good excuses for handing out a sampler of your eclectic musical tastes, and you only need a basic PC and a few programs to get the job done. Read on to learn how to create a basic mix; make tweaks and edits to songs; and design an eye-catching cover.

Browse to iTunes' importing tab to change its output format to WAV or a high-quality codec.
Click to enlarge.

Step 1: Assemble the mix disc
Most music fans have probably already gotten their hands on a copy of Apple's iTunes, and this media program will handle all of the basic mix-creation tasks. For top-notch sound quality, you'll likely want to use uncompressed WAV files on your mix, though MP3s ripped at 192Kbps sound almost as good to the majority of listeners. Even if all the tracks to be included on your custom CD are already in iTunes's library, you might still want to convert them to a higher bit rate or to a WAV file. To change the output format and bit rate, go to iTunes's Edit menu item and click Preferences. Click the Advanced tab, then hit the Importing tab. From there, you can choose file format and bit rate using the drop-down menus. Once you're back in the music library, right-clicking any song will give you an option to convert it into whatever format you just selected.

Creating a playlist in iTunes will allow you to add any song in your music library to your custom mix. Click to enlarge.

If you want to use certain songs from different CDs, iTunes can rip the files and import them to your library. When you insert a compact disc into your PC, a window with several options will appear. Scroll through the choices, select "Import songs using iTunes," and click OK. The program will then rip the entire disc to your hard drive and add all the tracks to your music library.

Once all the songs are on your PC, it's time to assemble them into a mix. Go to the File menu item, select New Playlist (or click the left column of the iTunes interface and type Ctrl+N), and name it. Head back to your Library, select a track, drag it to the playlist, and repeat the process until the mix is complete. You can reorder the sequence by browsing to the playlist and dragging the songs around.