Mixing and mastering your songs onto a CD is more than just dragging and dropping. There are many variables that need to be taken into account to make sure that an album plays well. When mastering onto a CD, making the songs fit well together can be difficult. After you've done the required balancing for each track, the tracks need to be balanced once again for each other. The general rule to balancing songs well together is to match the vocals as much as possible, which allows you to keep the songs individual and unique from each other. If the song is an instrumental track, balance the main melodic part of the track. Next balance the volume to each other. If one track is louder than the rest, it will be easy to hear. You don't want your listener to have to keep adjusting their volume while listening.
If you put a CD into a CD player you'll notice that rather than playing 25 minutes worth of songs, the CD player will play the songs track by track, restarting its time display every time a new track starts. If you put the song into iTunes, at the top of the screen you'll get information on what song you're listening to, by what artist and maybe with some album art. That's not downloaded by iTunes, it's a set of encoding hidden in the files of the CD.
If you've opened a CD in Windows Explorer you will have noticed that it's not just a set of songs. There are folders, audio files and text files. This is the encoding, data that iTunes and CD players will read. Here the album artwork is most likely stored. To add album artwork to your own CD, open VLC and hit CTRL+I. Head to the General tab and right click on the orange cone at the bottom. Select "Add cover art from file". Then you will need to locate your file and add it in. This is what media players like iTunes will read.
Most other parts of data are stored in the file of the song. Every song has a "Header" whether you are using MP3, OGG or .WAV files. The header is the encoding. It tells the computer how to read the song, like the key to a map. Inside here is the name of the song, and the song artist. It also contains PQ codes, that tell the player when to end the song. ImgBurn seems to be the best program for this.
A header for a song is called a header because it comes at the start of the song. This is not always true however. OGG files and MP3 files are compressed. Every common song format uses a similar structure. They use "Frames". It's less like a video frame and more like a picture frame - like the sort you would hang on a wall. They encase song files. Each frame has it's own header, telling the player about the frame. Some file encodings compress their files, and have more frames, therefore more headers. The headers tell the computer only the necessary information about how to read the information inside the frame. Uncompressed files have bigger headers, but usually only one, since only one frame is needed.
You can prove this yourself. Take an uncompressed picture file like a .TIFF or even better, a BMP and save it as a text file using GIMP or Photoshop. Open a sound manipulation program like Adobe Audition, or Cubase. Import the text into the program, and you will have a sound file. You are looking at your picture, being read in a different way. Do what you want with it - make change by change, try looking at some effects like compression, try equalising, and try pitch modulation. Once you're done, convert it back into a text file, and read it with GIMP or Photoshop. You will notice that if you touch the first 20 seconds of the song or so, the file will just break. This is the header, which both audio and picture files depends on to play. The more you mess with, the more likely the file is to be unreadable.
The reason this is possible is because audio and picture files are read the same way.
Audio files each have their own advantages. The main thing that separates one file from another is compression techniques and info placed in the header. Compressed files just drop data it finds unimportant. One of the most popular file encodings, MP3 is popular because it balances the right amount of quality and file size. It's small, but you won't notice much of a difference without high quality speakers. Tidal, for example focuses on uncompressed files, and streaming them. It requires fast internet, great quality speakers/ headphones, and a £10 subscription each month, which is why most websites like Spotify will stick to compressed files.
