I am pulling my hair out over here!

I have a friend who wants my songs on CD and it has literally been 20 years since I burned audio CDs! So, here is where I am so far...

- I rendered 10 songs as WAVs at 44.1kHz/16 bit
- next I tried to add metadata but it wouldn't work until I realized I had rendered the files on a FAT drive instead of NTFS
- so I rendered them again to an NTFS drive and was able to add metadata
- but when I then burned them the metadata was missing
- then I read online that FLAC is better than WAV for 2 reasons, 1) smaller, lossless files and 2) they are more metadata-friendly
- so I rendered all 10 songs again as FLAC
- I added metadata in the Reaper Media Explorer
- but I found that Reaper Media Explorer doesn't support some metadata stuff like an image
- so I then loaded each song into mp3tag and added the image and a few other bits that were not available in Reaper
- then I used Windows 11 "Windows Media Player Legacy" app to burn my audio CD
- the CD burned fine and the metadata was there but it was missing album-level metadata for stuff like album name, genre and date
- I cannot see any way to add this to Windows Media Player Legacy app before burning
- so I downloaded Ashampoo free CD burning software but it was also missing the album-level metadata plus it lost all of the track metadata
- so I switched back to Windows Media Player Legacy and settled for missing album metadata
- I also noticed some track metadata that I entered is not being included even in Windows Media Player Legacy

Can anyone tell me, step-by-step, how to make an audio CD with complete metadata and show me what I am doing wrong? Or, if what I am trying to do just isn't possible? Thanks in advance for any help!