Problems burning audio CD

Question

I made a playlist of 10 songs, 64MB worth. I hit "burn", and the status bar read "preparing disc", listing the tracks. When it got to track 5 it said "cancelling burn" It spit my blank CD out and an alert box popped up that said
"the attempt to burn a disc failed. the disc you are attempting to use is full. removing files and emptying trash will free up additional space."
the disc is a 700 MB, 80 min disc, there's no way it's full!
My compy is an early imac running
OSX 10.3.9
when the alert comes up, my hard drive has only 16 MB available, when I hit OK it says i've got
190 MB available. Help? how much space is required to burn a CD?

Answer 1

You don't say anything about what computer you have. If it were me, in the long run I would either think of buying a larger internal drive, or two external drives (one as a backup for the other). In the short run you can transfer files off your computer onto an external drive for long enough to get your computer working again, then start storing files on good quality media. If you get cheap CDs or DVDs you may find them to be unreadable a year down the road, and of course you lose your files. I have a bunch of music archived on bare drives (no enclosure, just the hard drive) that I only plug into my computer long enough to transfer files on or off. That's the cheapest per GB.
In the short term it is vital you clear up space because I am not kidding about the drive crashing. I have 3 1GB flash drives, so if it were me I'd use them for a few days until I could get another storage solution.