1. Try one of the free CD burning programs first - there are a few.

2. Get yourself one or two rewritable CD's to muck about with, stop making coasters

3. Try "burning" to an iso file, and if that is successful, burn that to CD, if it works you may have an issue with the conversion to CDA format during the burning (although rare these days, it was a big issue with slower computers and CD burners with no buffer under run protection in the past )