Yes, audio CD’s are so passé but when my niece’s school teacher gave assigned her a project that involved creating a mixed audio CD from some MP3 files, there is nothing much you can do but help her create an audio CD. After all her school grades depend on this project idea from 1990’s. While working through the project I wanted to test the audio CD before finally burning it on a physical blank CD. And the easiest way to do this in a Windows PC is to first create an audio CD image, load the CD image in a virtual CD drive and see if everything is OK.
So here is a simple way to create and load an audio CD image from MP3 files in Windows:
- Download and install UltraISO in Windows. This is not free software but it does the job without much nagging and not necessary, but if you like it then you may purchase the software license.
- Launch UltraISO and choose File → New → Audio CD Image from the menubar.
- Now drag and drop all the MP3 files that you want on the audio CD image into the upper file panel. UltraISO will show how much space is left as you add more and more files.
- When you are done adding the files, you can click on the Save icon in the toolbar and choose to save the CD image in the BIN/CUE format. You cannot use the ISO image format for audio CD’s in UltraISO.
- UltraISO will convert all the MP3 files into WAV/PCM format before saving the CD image. When the CD image is ready, you can load it into a virtual CD drive. UltraISO offers its own virtual CD drive, so you can just right-click on the BIN disk image and choose UlraISO → Mount to drive.
If you do not want to use the UltraISO virtual disk drive then you can also use Virtual Clone Drive or some other similar software.