For the last couple of days I’ve been working on making custom CD’s to play at my impending wedding. My strategy:
Copy individual tracks (from CD’s we own, of course!) to my hard drive.
Using Windows Media Player, and with my new playlist of tracks up, select “Copy to CD or device”
Watch it go to work.
Everything seems to go fine. I end up with a CD full of songs that I can play just fine on my PC. The problem is, the CDs (two different ones) go unrecognized by both of the conventional CD players in my house.
Does anyone know what’s going on, and how I can burn a CD using my computer that will play somewhere outside my PC?
Possibly relevant details:
I’m using Staples CD-RW blanks (74 min / 650 Megs)
My PC is running WindowsXP (home edition)
I’m using Windows Media Player for Windows XP
I only burned 60-some minutes onto each CD, so it’s not a case of overloading the disks’ capacity.
Any help you can give will improve the quality of our wedding reception, and thus would obviously be greatly appreciated.
Looks like it defaults to WMAs. I’m guessing that I need WAVs, but I’ve just spent half an hour poking around the Windows Media Player, and cannot for the life of me figure out how to get a track from my audio CD original, to my computer hard drive, as anything but a WMA.
Use Nero. You can download a free demo version here. It will automatically convert the audio files to .cda, which is the required format for playing on a standard CD player.
Hm. I’ve downloaded the demo version of Nero, but I don’t see any utility for converting WMAs to CDAs. In fact, it doesn’t seem to “see” files in WMA format at all.
Hm. If I used CD-R, would that cause the file format to be .cda rather than .wma? According to Q.E.D., it’s the file format of the tracks themselves that’s the problem. (Or, perhaps, I’m misunderstanding the source of the difficulty…)
I don’t know anything about the different file formats. However, I have burned many CDs using Windows Media Player (I didn’t alter any settings for file formats) and had CD-Rs work just fine in all my CD players. However, I have friends who have had trouble getting CD-RWs to play in their CD players (apart from their computers). It seems some CD players simply don’t recognize CD-RWs (I’m not sure of the technical reason why). Give CD-R a try.
A .cda file is the computer representation of where the track is located physically on the CD. A .cda file does not contain audio information, merely pointer information.
When you burn an audio CD (onto a CD-R or CD-RW), whether the files be MP3, WMA, WAV, or what have you, it’s all converted to a standardized format (128 kHz, 128 kbps if I’m not mistaken), so the source file format becomes irrelevant. Once burned, it’s no longer an MP3 or a WMA or what have you.
The difference is basically in the type of material that the CD is made from. The material that information is encoded on on a CD-RW disc is much more flexible than that of CD-R material so that it can be easily erased and re-written. This is a bastardized generalization of the process; but, suffice it to say, a lot of household stereo equipment, and many car CD players as well, don’t have the capability to read from the type of material in CD-RW discs; whereas they can read easier from CD-Rs.
Hopefully someone will clarify any technical detail I’ve oversimplified, but that’s the basic idea. Switching to CD-Rs should solve your problem, specifically if your audio equipment isn’t new. New electronics that CAN read discs burned to CD-RWs are usually marked specifically as such as a selling point in stores.
As a nitpick, the data rate on an audio cd is much higher than 128kbps. 44.1kHz stereo audio comes out to about 150kBytes/sec, not 128kbit/sec.
128kbps is a reasonably good data rate for near-cd-quality audio using one of many available lossy compression methods, but it’s much lower than actual audio cd’s use, since they’re not compressed.
CD-R’s are dirt cheap, not quite free, for the state sales tax after rebate(s). Watch the ads at Best Buy, CompUSA, Office Depot, Office Max, Staples, etc. Big Lots even had a close out of 3 1/2 floppies at next to nothing and a big tote bin was empty before I got to it.
