Audio & video software forum: How do you Make A Playable Music CD Archive

To be more specific, I dont really know what machine he plans to use the CD's in. I imagine its for an older high end sound system that does not have memory card ports. He has 171 songs that need to be put onto a physical copy for his CD player(s). Windows Media Player seems to say I need five CDs, but then either it's screwing up and writing the same songs over again or it's so convoluted that I keep screwing it up becuse it's not as automatic as I'd like it to be.
As for the DVD, thats no problem, Ive already got it done. I always make a DVD backup for him in case he ever upgrades to a newer machine that can read it, so he doesnt have to have 5 or six CDs to figure out. I only mention that because I want to say that somewhere between swapping out the CDs and starting to write discs 2-3-4 and 5, something keeps messing up and I wind up with two or more copies of the same songs, and cant seem to get the others written to CD properly. To make it worse, the CDs dont support the song and album data like the DVDs do, so checking each disk afterwards is a pain in the arse.

software. I am still running win2000. But here is something I don't understand; why try burning 5 cd at a time? Why not just one cd at a time.

Im only burning one CD at a time. WMP seems to keep messing up somewhere between finishing each CD because it doesnt remove the files that have finished burning from the list of files to be burned. Ive just been folowing its instructions when it pops out a CD and tells me to put the next one in. Sometimes it goes sto the next batch of songs, sometimes it tries to burn the same batch it's already done. All Ive donte is tols it to optimize the CDs for CD players and clicked the "start burn" button with each disc I put in, because I dont see a resume or continue burn button anywhere.

You need to use the burn Audio CD tab and burn cds one at a time. Make sure you close or finalize each cd.
I only load enough files to fill 1- 80 min cdr at a time.
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows7/Burn-a-CD-or-DVD-in-Windows-Media-Player

You could try a free burning program that works very nice.
http://www.burnaware.com/

Ill look at the software you suggested. I am only burning one disc at a time, unless you mean manually devide the 171 songs into just enough to fill the CD and treat each disc as a single burn in WMP. I tried that before but even though I devided them up evenly, and to use less total space than was on each CD, it always wound up telling me I needed two or more CDs to burn the one batch.

Burnaware seems to have worked really well, though I still had to figure out how to devided the music among the CDs manually, and I couldnt seem to name the CDs. I realized when I selected multiple songs at once and looked at the properties for the bunch of them at once, I could see the totaled play time, and could select/deselect songs until I got 1:20 or less. Oddly, my CDs were listed as 700 mb in capacity, but the program burned more than 800 mb onto some of them. Previoulsy when I tried manual CD burning I looked at the 700 mb capacity instead of play time, and that seems to have been what was messing me up when deviding them up manually.

I appreciate all the help everyone, but if somebody knows how to do this effectivley on WMP I'd appreciate a reply, otherwise Im done with this archive.