About Burn CD Online
Burn CD Online is a browser toy that rebuilds the whole ritual of the mix CD-R: stack a tracklist against a 74-minute ceiling, watch the write pass, write the title across the disc face in marker, and play it back on a Y2K portable player. It is free, it needs no account, and it saves nothing.
The constraint is the point
A modern playlist has no edges. You can add a thousand songs to it, reorder them forever, and never once have to decide what to leave off. The mix CD-R had an edge, and the edge is what made it a gift rather than a list: 74 minutes, one write pass, no undo. Ten songs fitted comfortably. Thirteen did not. The last slot was the one worth arguing about.
That is the only mechanic this site really cares about. The capacity meter counts each track’s full running time against 4,440 seconds, exactly as a blank disc would have had to hold it, and it turns amber in the last ten percent and red when you overrun. Everything else on the page — the laser sweep, the tray that takes the disc, the spectrum bridge, the Sharpie handwriting — is there to make that constraint feel like something instead of a number.
What the music actually is
Track titles, artists, running times and cover art come from the public Apple Music catalogue, fetched live through this site’s own search endpoint. Playback is the official 30-second preview Apple publishes for each track, because that is the longest clip the catalogue exposes and this site does not host, store or redistribute any audio of its own.
So the player runs on two clocks, deliberately. The transport plays a 30-second preview and says PREVIEW on the LED while it does it. The capacity meter counts the real 3-to-5-minute running time, because that is what a real 74-minute disc would have had to fit. Confusing the two would make the meter a lie, and the meter is the whole app.
A small number of catalogue entries have no preview at all. Those are marked in the search results, and the transport walks through them in silence rather than stalling.
What this is not
- Not a CD burner. It cannot write to a physical disc, and your computer almost certainly does not have a drive to write to. Nothing here touches your filesystem.
- Not a music service. No audio is stored here and nothing is downloadable. Every clip is streamed from Apple’s own CDN.
- Not a playlist exporter. The share buttons on step 7 copy your tracklist to the clipboard as plain text. Paste it wherever you like; nothing is posted anywhere on your behalf.
- Not affiliated with Microsoft, Apple or any record label. The Windows 95/98 visual conventions are referenced affectionately.
Why it looks like 1998
Because the object it is about is from 1998. The bevels, the grey, the title bars with their three tiny buttons and the LED readout are not a filter laid over a modern app — the whole interface is drawn that way, down to the hard two-tone borders that period raster art used because it had no antialiasing to spend. The window controls are real, too: minimise, maximise and close all work, and close sets a window aside rather than destroying what you built.
The one place the nostalgia gives way is accessibility. Every control is reachable by keyboard, every state change is announced to a screen reader, the whole thing works at 375px wide, and the animations stop when your system asks for reduced motion. A 1998 interface that nobody could use would be a costume, not a tribute.
Contact
Corrections, broken tracks and bug reports are welcome at hello@burncdonline.com, or through the contact page. If you are wondering what happens to anything you type here, the short answer is “nothing” and the long answer is on the privacy page.