Can't fit 73mb of songs on a 700mb disk?

Question

I was asked to copy a disk for a friend, just 73.6MB of songs on a 700MB CD-R. The songs imported easily, but when I tried to burn the playlist, I was told they wouuldn't fit!??

Answer 1

ITunes stores music files in one format, but if you want to burn an audio cd that is playable on a regular cd player, it must convert each song into another format. So when you're browsing through iTunes, the sizes you see (like 73.6mb) represent the size occupied by the files as they reside on your computer. But when you ask the computer to create an audio cd, those files will occupy much more space than 73.6mb.
This is all completely normal. A typical audio cd contains audio data that will often fill up an entire 700mb cd with audio data. When you import those songs into your computer, they will typically be reduced to about 1/10th their original size.
When burning audio cds from iTunes playlists, a much more useful indicator would be to look at the total duration of all the songs. If you're asking it to create more than 80 minutes of music as an audio cd, it will not work. Some audio cds only support 74 minutes of music.
Try removing tracks in your playlist until you get under 80 minutes, and burn that.