(read entirely before starting music CD creation)

At the moment, CD writers are very slow, specially external ones which connect through the standard printerport of your PC. It's always better to have an internal one, or if external, choose a scsi device which is faster, for that you'll need the right scsi port on your PC (if you don't have one, you can get a scsi card for $50 or so from adaptec, in case it's not included in the scsi CD writer package).

This test was done on a HP 7200 series (2x external which is connected to the parallel printer port of the PC). The included music CD creation software never worked for me so I downloaded a shareware tool called Nero Burning (v. 4.0) from Ahead.de.

First of all you'll need to free up some space on your harddrive. I only know how to make a music CD in one session, so a full music CD is about 600-800mb.

And by the way, Nero Burner might not be compatible with your current CD writing software, so you might want to uninstall that first.

You should have at least four or five new cd-r discs available ($2 a piece) - just in case the first try isn't a success. I must admit, until now I used up at least 5 or 6 CD r before making a fully functional music CD that can be listened on any CD player.

Now, before even launching Nero Burner, make sure you exit ALL other programs which are currently running, you can use ctrl-alt-del (once only) to close those which can't be closed through the taskbar or trayicon. I believe the only thing which should be running is the explorer.exe and systray. Also, turn off ALL powersaving features of your PC such as screensaver (right-click on desktop-screen saver-scrollbox to none) and hard disk sleeping (control panel-power management- always on), monitor savings,  and so on

Verify that all cables of the CD writer are really plugged in. When you've checked everything and no other program is running, you can launch Nero Burner and a "New Compilation" pop up wizard thing will appear. Make sure to choose Audio-CD on the left scroll down panel and on the burn tab choose the lowest burning speed (although the one I tested was a 2x writer it always caused failures, but at 1x speed, it worked)
we will choose disc-at-once, that is we already have all the wav files on the hard drive (ie around 40-60mb per song and usually their are 8 to 13 songs on a CD so now you must have about 600mb of wav files that you have prepared on your hard drive so that you now can burn it to CD) and want to do all the burning in one session (so you can't add any more after this session)  

With your first music CD, better select simulation, this will take twice as long, but it will simulate the entire burning process (it may take 45 minutes or more). After the first successful music CD burning, you can deselect 'simulation' in order to speed up the process

use this document at own risk. It's only to give you some things to consider.