Okay, along the lines of the meme that no questions are stupid, I’ve got a few questions about burning CDs.
I have an extensive collection of MP3s that are typically downloaded/played/stored in WM10. I’ve tried on more than one occasion to burn a CD (correct type, formatted, etc.) on my high quality drive.
They never play back on any players other than computers. What am I doing wrong? I also have iTunes installed. Would burning them with iTunes solve this issue? I thought that MP3s were supposed to play on many different pieces of equipment. I burned a special CD for my hub on Valentine’s day but he was upset that it wouldn’t play in his truck’s CD player.
As always, the knowledge of the teeming ones is greatly appreciated.
The age of your audio playback equipment may be an issue, since only newer players are designed with burned media in mind. Nothing that I burn will play on my home CD or DVD players, both of which are more than 10 years old, but burned discs will play in the cheap (but newer) CD player I have on my desk at my office. My old car CD player (1995 model car) would not play burned CDs, but my new car’s player (2003 model) will.
Apologies if the following is too basic, but you seem to be confused about the difference between data CDs and audio CDs.
There are two type of CDs you can make out a collection of MP3s: data CDs and audio CDs. When you take a store-bought CD and turn it into MP3s on your computer, the computer is compressing the data in such a way that the resulting file doesn’t take up oodles & oodles of space on your hard drive. Your computer knows how to decipher these files on the fly and play them back to you, so when you press “play” on your MP3-playing software, it’s exactly like hitting “play” on your CD player.
When you try to put these files on a CD, then, you could be doing one of two things: either writing the compressed data files directly to the disc, or “uncompressing” them to something resembling their original state on the audio CD you bought. Putting compressed files on the disc will, of course, allow you to put more files on the disc. However, most older CD players don’t have the same software built into them to allow them to “decompress” the compressed files on-the-fly, like your computer does. To such a player, it’s as if you put a CD-ROM containing software or pictures into the CD player; the electronics inside don’t know how to interpret the bits & bytes encoded on the disc as music, and so it can’t play the disc.
Burning the disc with iTunes should solve the problem; just make sure that under Preferences: Advanced: Burning, you have “Audio CD” selected and not “MP3 CD” or “Data CD.”
I have also noticed that the brand of disc sometimes matters. I have no idea why, but my home stereo dislikes the colored TDK discs and will not read them but reads the maxell discs just fine. I had a similar experience in a rental car once too.
Assuming you’re burning your CD for audio playback (that is, not as an mp3 CD) there’s one other thing that comes to mind: are you using CD-R or CD-RW disks? I’ve found that the rewritable CD-RWs often won’t play on regular audio equipment. The one-off CD-Rs usually work just fine.
Just to counter this, while aware we’re both just giving anecdotal evidence: my main hifi unit is from the early 90s (enourmous, but still bloody good), and I’ve not long ago had reason to use a portable CD player I bought in 1995, and both haven’t had any problem with CD-Rs.
I had a 1993 Honda Accord with the original factory CD changer which played burned CDs with nary a hitch. On the other hand, the home midi system I bought in 1999 wouldn’t play them for shit.
It really sounds like you are confusing music burned as an audio cd, which is a format compatible with any cd or dvd player, with the mp3 format most new players can also play.
A separate issue is the recording media color can sometimes be a problem with different earlier lasers which is a media compatibility problem not a format problem.
I really think you are dealing with the first issue only.
Some CD players (like my neat little Sony CD Walkman bought a couple months ago) can play MP3s off of a data CD just fine. It gets AM, FM, Weather band, and TV audio too. Not that it helps anyone here, I just like to brag.
To make a standard music CD you need to burn it as a standard music CD, complete with appropriate lead ins/headers. It’s not entirely obvious the OP has done this, rather than just copying MP3 files onto a CD.
Are you talking about CDA files? - those aren’t real - they’re shortcuts created by Windows to make CD Audio tracks accessible through the explorer interface.
They don’t actually exist on the CD - they’re a fiction generated by the OS on the fly.
I’m not even sure they are ‘files’ in the same sort of sense that files exist on a data CD (or a DVD, for that matter - those are definitely file-based) - I think the music data is just stored in ‘tracks’ - obviously, that is some kind of filesystem, as it’s indexed and contains data about lead in times and track lengths, etc.
As for moving CDA files… dunno - does it actually work? - are the CDA files still playable after moving, when the CD has been removed from the drive?
Music CDs don’t have a filesystem as much as they have encoded audio and some metadata to allow CD players to jump to a specific track directly (and optionally textual or graphical metadata as well, which is an extension to the standard). The relevant standard is commonly called the Red Book and is not freely available, but some details exist online. Remember that this was developed in the 1980s, back when a handheld computer meant an eight-bit microcontroller with a tiny amount of RAM and some software in ROM and maybe some specialized circuitry besides.
If you don’t want to use iTunes you can use Winamp. You need to setup your playlist, then hit ctrl+k. Navigate to the option that says “output” (under plug-ins) and double-click on null-soft disk writer. Choose a directory for output, and then just double-click on your first song. Winamp will go through and create a .wav file of all of the songs in the directory you just chose. Those can then be burned directly to CD with your favorite burning program.
Sorry, I know this is a bit more complicated than iTunes-- I’m just letting you know that you have (also free) options that aren’t the same kind of memory hog that iTunes is.
