I bought a new music CD and when I put it in my car player right out of the jewel case it played but with a bunch of noise. I tried it on my home player and my computer and it played fine. I tried it again in the car and this time the player actually spit it out without playing it, twice. I’ve never had this problem with any other CD.
Is this likely a CD defect or a problem with the player, or one of those, “We’ll never really know” problems?
I could exchange the CD (Amazon, mail it, wait to get a replacement) but I’m thinking I’ll try to cut a copy (fair use!) on the computer first.
I had a problem when I would bring room temperature CDs (from the house) into my cool/cold car in the morning and put them into the car stereo. The temperature differential would cause the CDs to fog up and render them unplayable. After the car warmed up enough the fogging would stop and the disks would play.
You don’t give enough details in your OP, so I don;t know if this matches your situation.
Some CDs are bad right out of production. Really there is no way to tell unless you put it on a test player connected to an oscilloscope, so that the encoded data envelope can be viewed by a knowledgabe technician. It could be borderline bad, and your home player can deal with it but the car player can’t.
Here’s something I’ve seen rec. for car CD players. There could be some uneveness to the outer edge of the CD. Run a hard pen around the outer edge of the CD to smooth it out.
After reading World Eater’s post, I checked again. Upon closer examination I found something on the surface near the edge which I cleaned off with water, wiping out from the center. That seemed to do the trick. It was very minor and I did look before and didn’t notice it. So it looks like the car player is just not as robust as the others. Thanks for your help.
If you can return/exchange the CD I would do so. Maybe it’s just a flaky copy, but if the replacement acts the same, it’s probably just something in the mastering that makes your car player freak out.
Some CDs are just plain twitchy…for example, the other day, I put a Phil Collins CD in my brand new AWESOME CDRW/DVD drive, and it froze then crashed my system. But my standalone player AND my older Sony 32x CDRom (which is slowly dying and WON’T read about 90% of my music CDs) had zero problems with it. (No, it’s not copy protected, I’ve owned this CD since 1986. Unless the RIAA has learned time travel!!!)