How To: Creating a music DVD with Roxio Toast 8

Modern CD / DVD burners and software allow you to create flashy DVD music discs. Music DVD can contain many hours of music, it has navigation menus and it displays album artworks. Once you create a music DVD, hook it up to your home theatre system to experience Dolby digital. You can use regular DVD + /- R or RW discs to create music DVD, but it’s even better if you use HD-DVD (15GB) recordable disc. Recordable HD-DVD’s can be bought from Amazon for around US$ 17.00 depending on manufacturer. In this tutorial I am going to explain how to easily create music DVD using HD-DVD format that provides superb image and sound quality. Optionally, you can use regular DVD-R, DVD R DL or even DVD RW. I highly recommend HD-DVD! Before you begin, take a look at the checklist to make sure you have everything you need.

Checklist:

- Mac Book or a MacBook Pro of newer generation.

– Roxio Toast 8 *

- Blank (recordable) HD-DVD disc

- Lots of patience

Now when you are sure that you have everything you need, we can begin the tutorial.

1. First you need to carefully choose music from your CD collection that you want to use. If you don’t have that many CD’s, you can make an audio DVD of your entire collection if you like. The more, the merrier! On your Mac or your external hard drive, create a new folder where you will copy music from your CD’s to. You name it say “My audio”. Please only use CD’s that you have bought, otherwise it could violate copyright laws in your country. CD audio music is easy to copy to your hard drive using simple drag and drop. The music is in AIFF (uncompressed format). Make sure you have enough storage space. It is also important to say that some music CD’s are copy protected which means that music can not be digitally copied or extracted. The good news is that most of the copy protection systems have been developed for Windows OS, and do not work (or they can be disabled easily) on the Mac. If you need more help about digital music extraction, remember, Google is your friend!

2. After you have ripped and sorted all your music in folders, run Roxio Toast 8, click on “Audio” and select “Music DVD” from sub-menu. Click on “More” button then click on “Encoding” tab, check “Custom radio button ” and set it as pictured below:

You can also choose the menu style that you want. Roxio has a few menu styles but they are rather boring. I’d recommend downloading additional menu styles to make your design more unique. Keep in mind that when you are dragging music, do not drag the whole folder then open it, select all files and then drag over the burning window.

3. When you are sure that you’ve done everything right and your files are being imported, hit “Record disc” button to start recording process. While recording is in progress, you can make a coffee, do some groceries, because encoding and burning will take time (this is where lots of patience kicks in). Burning and encoding speed will vary depends on how fast your Mac is.

Tips:

- Always use uncompressed music.

- Never download album artworks off the Internet. Instead scan your own album artwork at higher resolution.

- You will get best performance if using HD TV set.

If you have additional questions, leave a comment or contact me.

Copying and distribution of copyrighted material is illegal!

This article is also available in PDF and can be found here.