My kids are really into High School Musical and Miley Cyrus, to the point where we bought them the soundtrack and they promptly broke the CD squabbling over it. I know I could buy a couple more but that's pretty expensive! Is there a way to just use iTunes to dupe a music CD so they could listen to the copy and we'd keep their Hannah Montana music (etc) safely stored away?

Dave's Answer:


It sounds like we have a similar dilemma: since you haven't bought your children Apple iPod units or similar, there's no easy way to authorize more than one device and give them copies of the music. And, as you say, even on sale, music CDs are still rather surprisingly expensive and there's no economy of scale (it's not like you can buy the first for $13.99, the second for $9.99 and the third for $4.99, for example)

Leaving you with the need to either refuse to let them touch the master CD, make them work to earn the money to replace a damaged CD, or, I dunno, just keep spending money and keeping these record production companies in business.

Fortunately, iTunes is your friend even in this situation! Let me show you how incredibly easy it is to pick all the tracks on a CD (I almost typed "album") and burn a new CD that's functionally identical. First off, put the original High School Musical, Camp Rock, or whatever teen tune in your computer and rip a copy of it. Now in iTunes you have the CD with all its tracks:



You can see that I've selected all the songs from the Beach Boys CD Greatest Hits.

Off the File menu choose New Playlist from Selection:



On the lower left corner of the Apple iTunes window you'll see a new playlist pop up:



Now I right click (aka Control-Click) on the playlist and the little pop-up contextual menu shows:



Choose Burn Playlist to Disc and it'll prompt you for the settings you prefer:



Looks good? Click on "Burn" and...



Put a blank CD in your computer and, after a second or three, you should see:



Followed rather quickly by:



When it's done nothing too exciting happens, you just suddenly realize that there's a new music CD on the Desktop.

Done!

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About the Author:
Dave Taylor is known as an expert on both business and technology issues. Holder of an MSEd and MBA, author of twenty books and founder of four startups, he also runs a marketing company and consults with firms seeking the best approach to working with weblogs and social networks. Dave is an award-winning speaker and frequent guest on radio and podcast programs.

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