WASHINGTON Those new to recording their own audio CDs often run into the problem encountered by Chris Schott, a Maryland-based technical writer who was foiled in his first attempts at getting his favorite songs onto disk.

"I recorded six songs onto a CD, which were not nearly enough to fill the disk," Schott told the German Press Agency DPA. "I played the disk in my car stereo. Everything worked fine. But later I decided to fill the disk with more songs. At that point, my software said the disk was full. I know it's not."

Recording audio CDs, as Schott discovered, is not at all as straight-forward as copying files to a floppy disk or a zip drive. when you record audio to a CD, you must "close" the disk at the end of the recording session before the disk will be usable in a standard audio CD player. "Closing" a disk essentially refers to a process whereby your software writes data that tells your CD reader that the disk is usable. Many CD recording programs close a disk for you by default when the songs you've instructed it to copy have been moved to the CD.

It's possible to write just a few songs to a CD at a time. In the world of CD writing software, doing this is referred to as writing a "session." Disks that contain multiple sessions are called, logically enough, multi-session CDs.

But even though you can write multiple sessions to an audio CD, the disk still will not be usable in a standard audio cd player until you instruct your software to "close" the disk. Once you've closed the disk - either intentionally or by letting your software do it automatically - you cannot add more songs to it, even if there is more space available on the CD.

For this reason, it makes sense to prepare an entire CD's worth of music on your hard drive before writing to a CD destined for your audio CD player. If you want to get as much music on an individual CD as possible, you can use your recording software to gauge exactly how many songs will fit.

Another mistake common to those new to the audio CD creation process is writing audio tracks to a CD-RW (rewritable) disk rather than a CD-R (write only) disk. Because of the special coating that allows CD-RW disks to be rewritable, these disks usually cannot be used in home audio or car stereo CD players.

You can record audio onto CD-R disks, by contrast, and use them without problems in both your computer's CD player and your home audio system.

The good news is that your CD-RW drive will write to both CD-RW disks and CD-R disks, so if you just make sure that you're using a CD-R disk when you record music, you should have no problems.

(DPA)