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OS 10.6.8 Toast Titanium 7. I have just tried to burn 168 MP3s on a CD. I have made over 30 of these before but now a window says it cannot burn any of them (words to that effect) I tried the built in optical drive and also a lacie external drive. At least 2 of these tunes were purchased from the apple store and yet none would burn. What has happened?
jaybass

There is a hard coded limit on the number of times a tune purchased through iTunes can be copied (burned to CD/DVD). If memory serves the limit is 8. After that you will need to repurchase the tune before you can burn additional copies. Some tunes that are purchased at a higher price $1.29 can be copied an unlimited number of times. This is in accordance with Apple's contractual agreement with RIAA.

I assume (I know, I know, that always gets me in trouble) that as a good citizen and unwilling to spend millions of dollars on legal fees and settlements with RIAA, Toast is also honoring that limit or at least some limit(s)?

With 168 copies of your discs out there surely you could get around the limit by duplicating one of the older discs?

I believe Jaybass tried to burn 168 MP3s/tracks to a single CD, rather than making 168 copies of that disc. However, that would still allow for the possibility that the 168 tracks selected exceeded the limit you were referring to.

When toast wouldn't burn those 168 tunes, I closed down toast and saved it to my desk top. After checking my settings, I decided to put another folder on my desk top and transferred all the tunes and then tried again and it successfully burnt the CD. I was 1MB over the 700. Why it didn't burn the first time is a mystery. Food for thought! Thank you both for your replies. jaybass.

You are of course correct, and I had that figured out when I started. Then I had a brain blip. I would like to lay that off to the effects of a week on morphine and a two week diet of ice chips, but that was three weeks ago.

The limit (which my memory says is 5) is not a per-track limit. It's a per playlist limit.

That is, make a list of 8 tracks. Burn it 5 times. Delete a track from the list, and add a different one. Burn 5 more times. Change the order of the tracks in the list. Burn 5 more times. Repeat as often as desired, so long as not more than 5 discs have the same tracks in the same order. There is of course no limit if all the tracks are DRM-free.

A workaround is to burn the track(s) once to CD, then re-import from the CD. The re-imported tracks will be DRM-free, and can be burned as many times in whatever order as desired. There may be some tiny loss of fidelity from the AAC to AIFF to AAC (or MP3) conversion. Or, burn one CD just the way you want it, and then duplicate that CD forever. Either way, you're exploiting what is known as the "digital loophole".

From iTunes 11 for Mac: Disc burning overview:

And Ganbustein's comments above should still provide a way around this limit of 7.