oh my GOD its such a lengthy process to put music on a cdr. you need to use audacity to export it as a wav 16bit/14.1khz file. or some other 3rd party program because windows doesnt want to do it for you when you go to burn a disc. UNHOLY. vile. takes like 10 minutes to load an album into audacity, convert to wav, copy to a slow ass flash drive, put the disc in my laptop, and burn the fucken thing and you BETTER HOPE it was burned as an audio cd because if it wasnt hooooooo golly you just wasted a cd.
thank god i bought 50 cds cuz i already went through like 3 trying to figure out how this shit works.
For converting audio into other formats, my go-to app is MediaHuman Audio Converter, it's 100% free and basically a friendly GUI frontend for the uber-powerful FFMPEG library. It's settings are simple and I believe CD Audio (uncompressed 16-bit 44.1khz stereo) is one of the defaults you can choose from a list. It's a lot less clunky than Audacity for this purpose imo.
Now, when it comes to burning a red book-compliant CD Audio disc, my go-to is ImgBurn. It's primarily for imaging data discs, but if you click the right buttons it'll always produce a flawless CD Audio disc. You have to select "Create CUE File" from the Tools dropdown, from there you can add your files to a .cue file, which is basically a text file full of metadata about a CD. You can even input CD-TEXT compliant song and artist names, so CD players can display that info as it plays! Out of the box ImgBurn supports only WAV and MP3 I believe, but you can install an extension called madFlac to add FLAC compatibility, if that's your thing. Once you've added all your files and they're in the right order, you save your .cue file to the same folder the audio files are in, go to ImgBurn's "Write" mode by pressing Ctrl+Shift+W or selecting "Burn Image To Disc" from the home menu, choose the .cue file you just created, click the Write button, and you're off! This is my usual workflow for creating CDs, and it's never let me down.
Lastly, to avoid worrying about failed burns, I highly recommend getting one or two CD-RWs! The RW stands for ReWritable; you can burn the disc, treat it like a normal CD, and then when you're ready to put something else on it, you can erase it entirely and burn it again as if it had never been used! These are super useful for testing purposes especially - instead of burning a bad disc (what many call a "coaster"), you can run all your test burns on a CD-RW and never worry about wasting money! CD-RWs are pretty cheap, and honestly if you hit me up (Telegram: aependell) (Discord: Pendell#5741) I'd be happy to mail you one or two for no charge, I have WAY too many discs laying around and I'm running out of room, so I'd be happy to pass some along to someone who could use them!
Only downside for CD-RWs is some of the oldest CD players won't be able to read them because they weren't an initial part of the CD spec, but if your CD player was made from like 1995 onwards you should be good.