How to burn FLAC files to an audio CD

Open the Audio CD page in Burn by Zaweba, drag your FLAC files in and burn. Burn decodes FLAC itself with its own built-in FFmpeg, so you don't need to convert the files first, and it writes a proper audio CD that plays in ordinary CD players. The same goes for WAV, OGG, Opus, M4A, WMA, AIFF, APE, WavPack and MP3.

FLAC is a lossless format, so it's a natural source for a CD. An audio CD made from FLAC carries the music at full CD quality, with nothing thrown away on the way.

Setting up the disc

Start an audio CD from Home, Disc > Audio CD or File > New audio CD. Drag your FLAC files in from Explorer. Put them in order by dragging, or with the arrow buttons. The page shows the minutes used against the disc's capacity as you go, so you can see straight away whether the album fits.

Decide on gaps. The usual two-second gaps between tracks can be turned on or off. For a live album or a classical piece where tracks run into one another, turn them off for continuous playback.

Getting the sound right

Albums from different sources often play at different volumes. Turning on normalise on the Audio CD page brings the tracks to a similar loudness, which helps on a mixed CD for the car. For a single album you already like the sound of, you may prefer to leave it off.

Remember that an audio CD has a fixed length, not a fixed number of files. A FLAC album takes the same playing time on the disc as the same album from MP3, because both are decoded to CD audio. File size on your PC tells you nothing about whether it fits, which is why the minutes used are the number to watch. If you're over, drop a track or move it to a second disc.

Burn handles the awkward cases for you. Mono recordings are doubled to stereo, and surround files are mixed down to the two channels a CD holds. Gapless MP3 and M4A files have their padding trimmed so tracks join cleanly.

Titles and checking

Burn can write the album, artist and every track title to the disc as CD-Text, which players and car stereos that support it show on their display. Titles are taken from the files' own tags where there are some, and you can type or correct them on the page.

After burning, with Check every disc after burning on in Settings, Burn checks the track list and each track's sound. It takes a few minutes longer and confirms the disc came out right.

Covers and the next step

Once the CD is made, Burn offers labels and covers using the track list: a CD front insert, a back insert with spines, a round disc label and more, made as an A4 PDF with crop marks. If you use Play by Zaweba, it can send a playlist to Burn, which opens the Audio CD page with the tracks and names filled in.

Going the other way, Save audio CD as files reads your own CDs back to FLAC, checked bit for bit, so a CD collection and a FLAC library can be kept in step with one program.