How to Burn Music CDs in Windows 10
By Andy Rathbone from Windows 10 For Dummies

To create a music CD with your favorite songs, create a playlist containing the CD's songs, listed in the order you want to play them; then burn the playlist to a CD. I explain how to do that in the "Creating, Saving, and Editing Playlists" section, earlier in this chapter.

But what if you want to duplicate a CD, perhaps to create a disposable copy of your favorite CD to play in your car? No sense scratching up your original. You'll want to make copies of your kids' CDs, too, before they create pizzas out of them.

Unfortunately, neither Windows Media Player nor Windows 10 offer a Duplicate CD option. Instead, you must jump through the following five hoops to create a new CD with the same songs in the same fidelity as the original CD:

    Rip (copy) the music to your hard drive.

    Before ripping your CD, change your burning quality to the highest quality: Click Organize, choose Options, click the Rip Music tab, and change the Format box to WAV (Lossless). Click OK.

    Insert a blank CD into your writable CD drive.

    In Windows Media Player's Navigation Pane, click the Music category and choose Album to see your saved CDs.

    Right-click the newly ripped album in your library, choose Add To, and choose Burn List.

    If your Burn List already had some listed music, click the Clear List button to clear it; then add your CD's music to the Burn List.

    Click the Start Burn button.

Now, for the fine print. Unless you change the quality to WAV (Lossless) when copying the CD to your PC, Windows Media Player compresses your songs as it saves them on your hard drive, throwing out some audio quality in the process. Burning them back to CD won't replace that lost quality. If you want the most accurate duplicates Windows Media Player can handle, change the Ripping Format to WAV (Lossless).

If you do change the format to WAV (Lossless) in order to duplicate a CD, remember to change it back to MP3 afterward, or else your hard drive will run out of room when you begin ripping a lot of CDs.

A simpler solution might be to buy CD-burning software from your local office supply or computer store. Unlike Windows Media Player, most CD-burning programs have a Duplicate CD button for one-click convenience.