Forgive me if this specific question has been asked before. I did try a search but I couldn’t find this particular question tabled anywhere.
I’m a home muso kinda guy, and recently I burnt some of my music onto a CD-R for a friend. I’ve never had a problem with burnt CD-R’s getting played on any equipment, but my friend tried to use his Sony DVD player thru his home entertainment system as his first system of choice. But his DVD player didn’t recognise my album as being a valid disk at all.
So we went over to my friends PC system which has a monster sound system hooked up to it and listened to it that way so it wasn’t a problem.
Also, my disk certainly plays in every car stereo we’ve tried, as well as traditional audio CD players.
Yet, even though my disk won’t work on friends DVD player - his machine however, WILL recognise and play commercial audio CD pressings made by major labels. So we got to wondering… why is this? Some of my friends CD albums are 10 years old or more, so there’s no way those CD’s have got any sort of copyright protection on them - and yet they play on the DVD player. But my own work, which of course I own the copyright on, won’t even get recognised by the DVD player… is it the fact that commercial pressings are on a true silver background in the CD perhaps?
I’ve heard talk that all commercial audio CD’s have a data track. Is this what I need to synthesise maybe?
The ability to play CD-R, CD-RW, and MP3 are features found on later model Sony DVD players. When I bought my DVD player, I assumed it would play my CD-Rs I had burned and was quite upset when it wouldn’t. My newer model Sony DVD (at 1/3 the cost) will indeed play all CD formats that I can create and can play MP3-encoded files as well. AFAIK, you can’t do anything more to a CD-R to make it play in the older Sony.
As to WHY, the question is much more murky. If you are a longtime Sony customer, you can easily see a pattern to features on products. The later the product, the more features. Early adopters usually get screwed to the floor feature-wise and wind up paying extra for the privilege. Of course it’s the march of progress, but I suspect that Sony has a policy of holding features back that COULD have been put into older models.
In short, I consider the lack of CDR functionality in our older Sony DVD players a conscious decision on Sony’s part. If another company produced Sony-quality products without “feature creep” I would switch away immediately.
Maybe his dvd player won’t read that type of media? Players of any kind are very picky on what media they read. Try another manf of media or look at his dvd player specs & see if it even reads cdrs or cdrws or whatever you are using.
Thanks for the replies folks. In answer to the last question, yes I use Sonic Foundy’s CD Mastering software called CD ARchitect which allos tracks to be intricately cross faded like a commercial release and they burn in disk at once mode…
Strange stuff to be sure…
Just as an aside, does anyone have anything to offer knowledge wise on the copyright protection data file I’m reading about?
Sony also seems reluctant to put out cd or dvd players which will play mp3 encoded CDRs. I am sure it is because they have hundreds of artists under contract and a catalog of thousands of albums. They don’t want to be fighting piracy with one hand and helping create it with the other, but if they want to sell electronics they eventually end up including the features.
Commercial audio CDs don’t have a data track - or at least most don’t. I don’t know how that new copy protection scheme they’ve been rambling on about lately works. It may use a data track - I don’t know - but I do know that if you’re using a CD that’s more than even a couple months old, that’s not the problem.
Prove it to yourself. Download IsoBuster and have it analyze a commercial CD. A Tori Amos CD single I just tried correctly showed four audio tracks in one session. No data tracks.
I can perhaps see why you’d suspect this, though. It seems that if a DVD player is just reading the same 1s and 0s off every CD, how can it possibly know which disc is a CD-R and which is a commercial CD, right?
Here’s how it works. Stamped CDs are made of a different material than the organic dye that coats CD-Rs. Different wavelengths are needed to decode the data. Many players even use two different lasers for the process, but it can be done with one. One possible solution to your problem is to use CD-RWs, which are slightly closer to DVDs in terms of “fooling” the DVD player. Before you waste a disc, though, you may want to check this site to see if someone has already tested your model.
That is not accurate. It is always necessary to close a disk to read it in anything else than a CD burner. As the disk in question was played in a stereo system, that is clearly not the case. Adding another session to a disk does not imply the disk is not closed. In theory, most modern optical drives (CD and DVD) should be able to read a multisession disk. In reality, however, it is hardware specific. DVD players are, in general, more picky than even older CD players and drives. (An aside: DVD-ROM drives in computers are usually able to read CD-Rs and -RWs)
Cleophus, perhaps, but I got that info from some people who tried this themselves. If they closed the disk it worked. BTW, I might be deaf but I work for a music store & we sell music cd blanks. They might be worth trying. They cost a little more sometimes. The ones I bought are rated for just any writing speed -which is weird.
It’s worth a try, but they probably won’t work either.
Those “music CDs” are only for “console CD-copiers” (the ones that hook to your stereo, not your PC). The only difference between those and “regular” CD-R discs is that they contain an extra track that is required by all the console players, as the RIAA imposed a “tax” on the console copiers to “replace” the money they might “lose” from unauthorized copying of CDs. That’s why they cost more than regular CD-Rs.
This is true, for the reason I stated. No non-CD burner drive can read an open session.
Paraphrased from http://www.cdrfaq.org/faq02.html#S2-19:
When a session is left open, the lead-in isn’t written. The lead-in, containing information on the session that follows, is required for the drive to read the session. This is done under the assumption that more data will be added later. When the session is closed, the lead-in is written. (It’s actually written somewhere else, but regular CD players and CD-ROM drives don’t look.) CD burners have firmware that “knows” to look at the alternate area the lead-in is written to. Since the CD in the OP could be read in a CD-ROM drive, that wasn’t the problem.
Audio CD blanks ARE THE EXACT SAME THING AS “REGULAR” BLANKS, functionally. They cost more not because they are better quality or something like that, but because a tariff is placed on them under the assumption they will be used for pirating music. This tariff is paid directly to the recording industry.
Note that there is a “closed session” and there is a “closed disk”. (Note: term. varies.) A successful burn in track-at-once mode will always close the session. But you still have to close the disk for max. compatibility. A successful burn in disk-at-once will automatically close the disk. (No new sessions can be added.) You should only get a an open session if something went wrong during burning a track.
The first thing to check in the OPs case is that the disk is closed (not just the session). Well, since that was not the case, the next most likely cause is the reflectivity of the dye in the CD-R is not right for the DVD player to pick it up. The solution there is to try CD-Rs with different color dyes.
Another thing: During the closing of a disk, under some versions of MS-Windows with “auto insert notification” turned on, Bad Things can happen. “auto insert notification” should be turned off during burning (I turn it off all the time even on machines without burners).