Tutorial 9 – Exporting, CD burning and sharing

Once your Music Creator project is complete, you will want to share it by posting it online or burning a CD. Music Creator includes features that will allow you to share your music online through Facebook and Twitter, and burn audio CDs.

Before we get started, let’s open one of the example audio projects included with Music Creator. If you have your own project that already contains audio, you can load that instead. However, your screen will look different from the images in this tutorial.

1.	Go to Help > Quick Start to open the Quick Start dialog box.

2.	In the Open a Demo Project list, select Music Creator Tutorial Demo and click the Open a Demo Project button to open the project.

Now that you have opened the demo project (or your own audio project), click the Play button or press SPACEBAR listen to it. If you do not hear any audio, review the steps in Tutorial 1 to ensure Music Creator and your audio device are configured correctly.

Cakewalk Project Files are different from the audio you hear on a CD in that they are often multi-track as opposed to stereo. Nearly all songs you hear on CDs or stream online are stereo. In this example, you will notice that there are nine audio tracks. In order to burn this mix to a CD or prepare it for distribution, we need to export or mix it down to a stereo track.

In the Control Bar, click the Export button.

This will bring us to the Export Audio dialog box. This has many useful functions. Let’s explore some of them in detail.

You will notice that the top half of this window is very similar to the Open and Save dialogs. This is used to navigate to locations on your computer's hard drive and tell Music Creator where you want to store the exported audio.

Look in. Shows the folder to which you are exporting your audio. Browse your available drives to choose a different directory. Below the Look in field is a list of the selected folder's contents.

File name. Enter a name for the file you are creating.

Export preset. Select the desired export preset. The File Settings section displays the settings for the selected preset. The following presets are available:

CD Quality. Use this preset if you plan on burning your song onto an audio CD. Your song will be saved as a stereo Wave (.wav) file.

MP3. Use this preset if you plan on sharing your song with friends, or if you want to listen to your song on an MP3 player. Your song will be saved as an MP3 (.mp3) file.

Share with SoundCloud - CD Quality. Use this preset if you want to share a CD quality version of your song on SoundCloud. This format will result in a larger file size and may take longer to upload.

Share with SoundCloud - FLAC. Use this preset if you want to share a FLAC version of your song on SoundCloud. FLAC is a royalty free high quality lossless audio compression codec. Files compressed with FLAC can be 30-50% smaller than the original wav file and unlike MP3 there is no loss of audio quality. Use this preset if you want to have a share a higher quality version of your song, but also want to have a shorter upload time to SoundCloud. Your song will be saved as a FLAC (.flac) file.

Share with SoundCloud - MP3. Use this preset if you want to share an MP3 version of your song on SoundCloud. Your song will be saved as an MP3 (.mp3) file. MP3 files are the smallest and fastest files to upload to SoundCloud, however they will not be as high quality as Wave or FLAC files.

Windows Media. Use this preset if you want to save your song in Windows Media (.wma) format.

Add to Audio CD Track List. Select this option to add the exported audio as a new track in the Audio CD Burner dialog box.

Note 1: Music Creator includes a 30-day trial MP3 encoder only.

Note 2: Sharing with SoundCloud options require an active Internet connection. For more information, see Sharing your songs on SoundCloud.

To burn an audio CD of your music

1.	Click the Export Audio button to open the Export Audio dialog box.

2.	In the Export preset list, select CD Quality.

3.	Enter a name for you mix in the File name box.

4.	Specify where you want to save the file.

5.	Click Export.

A progress bar appears while a CD quality audio file is exported. When the progress bar disappears, Music Creator has finished exporting your project.

Now we need to burn our mix to a CD. Music Creator features a built-in CD burning application that can do this for us.

 

See:

Burning an audio CD

Uploading audio to SoundCloud