Some time ago if you wanted to have your favorite band's new CD, you had to buy it at a record store or buy it online. With the cost averaging around $10 it could end up costing you if you wanted more than just a few CD's. If you couldn't afford to buy all those CD's you just waited for the radio to play it.

A few years later a great site like Napster game to be and you could download all the songs you wanted for nothing. You just saved it to your hard drive and transferred it to an MP3 player.

Now if you want to transfer all those songs to a CD so you could listen to them in your car, you only need one thing - a CD burner. Every computer comes with one now.

A CD burner comes in two formats, an external drive and an internal drive. Most people are probably familiar with the internal drives that connect to you CPU and is housed in your computer tower. The external drive on the other hand is not connected to the CPU and plugs in to your computer via a USB port.

CD burners not only copy songs from your hard drive but you can also copy one CD to another.

Now to use your CD burner, you need software. Most you can find free to download on the Internet. Some examples include Windows Media Player (this may already exist on your computer), Deep Burner, or ISO Recorder.

You can also buy better quality software like Nero and Roxio. The free software burns just the same as the ones that will cost you money but the better quality software will of course give you more features and ease of use.

Some might think a CD burner can only copy songs or audio recordings but this isn't the case. You can also copy different files, programs, pictures, games, etc. You can burn all kinds of files. How did we ever live without a CD burner?