Hi all,can anyone tell me why a cd burnt on my pc won't play on my in-car player?
Help!David.

Hi David
CD's burnt on a pc need to be 'finalized' in order to play on home/car systems. Most software gives you the option - 'finalize' or 'don't finalize'. The latter allows you to add more tracks to the CD in seperate sessions.
John

Even 'finalizing' the CD may not do the trick ... I've copied CDs on my Phillips 880 CD recorder and on my PC and they will play in my CD player, on my PC, in other players, in other autos, but WILL NOT play on the CD player in my 2000 Honda Accord !!! ....
t.

Hey Tony !! Don't blame the Honda Accord - I've got one of them and my PC recorded CDs play OK I do know that some car CD players just will not play CD-R discs and even some earlier domestic players won't play them either...

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Willum

Hello:

The word "Finalize" is used loosely that can be confusing, plus different CD burning applications may call it different. The term you're looking for is either "Close CD" or "Finalize CD". Doing this will completely close the CDR disk meaning it will be a CD disk and no further writing or burning is possible. Which should make it possible 99.99999% of the time playable on most audio CD Players, especially the older ones.

Note 1: Finalize session is in fact not closing a CD completely, the CDR is still recordable which may cause some problems on some audio CD Players.

Note 2: CDR disks I believe are the only disks that can work on audio CD Players, using CDRW disks are not compatible with audio CD Players, as far as I know...

Anthony

I find that if I burn a music CD on a "RW" disk that can be used over and over again, it will not play on my car CD.

If I burn it directly onto a CDR disk, then it will play on the car CD.

Some CD players only know how to play a CD "R" disk and not the CD "RW" disks.

Try this and see if it works.

Larry

A few notes about making your own CDs

We got our first burner just over five years ago and made the big mistake of thinking that just copying WAVs,MP3s and WMAs was all we had to do... Bad mistake...

I don't like preaching but here goes. Assuming you've made a WAV or MP3 file from your 'board it will play perfectly on your PC but it needs to be converted as follows. You must remember that this format is still not used in every part of the industry but is about 99% fool-proof. The formats go something like this:

MP3 (128Kbps) - Very compacted
WMA - Slightly less compacted
WAV - Not compacted and sounds like c__p
CD Audio - If recorded using an MP3 sounds as good as the original

I've gone away from the subject here but the answer to your problem is the software package that you're using to burn the disks. To be able to play them in your car, etc. they must have been written in CD Audio format and, unless your stereo is less than about 12 months old, burnt on to a CD-R disc not CD-RW.

To sum this up, everyone on the forum would probably like to make CDs of their music but the science, five years on, is still an infant in waiting.

Good luck,

Luce

[This message has been edited by Mark, Michie & Luce (edited 10-19-2004).]

Hi David,
I asked the same question some time ago and was pleased with the help I got.
I found this information at “How Stuff Works.Com” I hope it helps you.
Fred UK

How Does A CD Burner Work?
Content provided by HowStuffWorks.com
One of the biggest tech stories of the last few years is the rise of digital music. With peer-to-peer file swapping and legitimate music stores, you can now get a digital version of just about any song you want.
Electronics manufacturers and retailers saw an opportunity and sales of CD burners and blank CD-Recordable discs skyrocketed. Suddenly it has become feasible for the average person to gather songs and make their own CDs, and music-mix makers everywhere want to get their hands on the means of production. Today, writable CD drives (CD burners) are standard equipment in new PCs, and more and more audio enthusiasts are adding separate CD burners to their stereo systems. In less than five years, CDs have eclipsed cassette tapes as the mix medium of choice.
CD Basics

CDs store music and other files in digital form -- that is, the information on the disc is represented by a series of 1s and 0s. In conventional CDs, these 1s and 0s are represented by millions of tiny bumps and flat areas on the disc's reflective surface. The bumps and flats are arranged in a continuous track that measures about 0.5 microns (millionths of a meter) across and 3.5 miles (5 km) long.
To read this information, the CD player passes a laser beam over the track. When the laser passes over a flat area in the track, the beam is reflected directly to an optical sensor on the laser assembly. The CD player interprets this as a 1. When the beam passes over a bump, the light is bounced away from the optical sensor. The CD player recognizes this as a 0.
The bumps are arranged in a spiral path, starting at the center of the disc. The CD player spins the disc while the laser assembly moves outward from the center of the CD. At a steady speed, the bumps move past any point at the outer edge of the CD more rapidly than they move past any point nearer the CD's center. In order to keep the bumps moving past the laser at a constant rate, the player must slow the spinning speed of the disc as the laser assembly moves outward.
At its heart, this is all there is to a CD player. The execution of this idea is fairly complicated, because the pattern of the spiral must be encoded and read with incredible precision, but the basic process is pretty simple.
Reading and Writing CDs
The CD fabrication machine uses a high-powered laser to etch the bump pattern into photoresistant material coated onto a glass plate. Through an elaborate imprinting process, this pattern is pressed onto acrylic discs. The discs are then coated with aluminum (or another metal) to create the readable reflective surface. Finally, the disc is coated with a transparent plastic layer that protects the reflective metal from nicks, scratches and debris.
This is a fairly complex, delicate operation involving many steps and several different materials. Like most complex manufacturing processes (from newspaper printing to television assembly), conventional CD manufacturing isn't practical for home use. It's only feasible for manufacturers who produce hundreds, thousands or millions of CD copies.
Consequently, conventional CDs have remained a "read only" storage medium for the average consumer, like LPs or conventional DVDs. To audiophiles accustomed to recordable cassettes, as well as computer users who were fed up with the limited memory capacity of floppy disks, this limitation seemed like a major drawback of CD technology. In the early 1990s, more and more consumers and professionals were looking for a way to make their own CD-quality digital recordings.
In response to this demand, electronics manufacturers introduced an alternative sort of CD that could be encoded in a few easy steps. CD-recordable discs, or CD-Rs, don't have any bumps or flat areas at all. Instead, they have a smooth reflective metal layer, which rests on top of a layer of photosensitive dye.
When the disc is blank, the dye is translucent: Light can shine through and reflect off the metal surface. But when you heat the dye layer with concentrated light of a particular frequency and intensity, the dye turns opaque: It darkens to the point that light can't pass through.
By selectively darkening particular points along the CD track, and leaving other areas of dye translucent, you can create a digital pattern that a standard CD player can read. The light from the player's laser beam will only bounce back to the sensor when the dye is left translucent, in the same way that it will only bounce back from the flat areas of a conventional CD. So, even though the CD-R disc doesn't have any bumps pressed into it at all, it behaves just like a standard disc.
A CD burner's job, of course, is to "burn" the digital pattern onto a blank CD.
Burning CDs
Since the data must be accurately encoded on such a small scale, the burning system must be extremely precise. Still, the basic process at work is quite simple.
The CD burner has a moving laser assembly, just like an ordinary CD player. But in addition to the standard "read laser," it has a "write laser." The write laser is more powerful than the read laser, so it interacts with the disc differently: It alters the surface instead of just bouncing light off it. Read lasers are not intense enough to darken the dye material, so simply playing a CD-R in a CD drive will not destroy any encoded information.
The write laser moves in exactly the same way as the read laser: It moves outward while the disc spins. The bottom plastic layer has grooves pre-pressed into it, to guide the laser along the correct path. By calibrating the rate of spin with the movement of the laser assembly, the burner keeps the laser running along the track at a constant rate of speed. To record the data, the burner simply turns the laser writer on and off in synch with the pattern of 1s and 0s. The laser darkens the material to encode a 0 and leaves it translucent to encode a 1.
Most CD burners can create CDs at multiple speeds. At 1x speed, the CD spins at about the same rate as it does when the player is reading it. This means it would take you about 60 minutes to record 60 minutes of music. At 2x speed, it would take you about half an hour to record 60 minutes, and so on. For faster burning speeds, you need more advanced laser-control systems and a faster connection between the computer and the burner. You also need a blank disc that is designed to record information at this speed.
The main advantage of CD-R discs is that they work in almost all CD players and CD-ROMS, which are among the most prevalent media players today. In addition to this wide compatibility, CD-Rs are relatively inexpensive.
The main drawback of the format is that you can't reuse the discs. Once you've burned in the digital pattern, it can't be erased and re-written. In the mid '90s, electronics manufacturers introduced a new CD format that addressed this problem.
Erasing CDs
In the last section, we looked at the most prevalent writable CD technology, CD-R. CD-R discs hold a lot of data, work with most CD players and are fairly inexpensive. But unlike tapes, floppy disks and many other data-storage mediums, you cannot re-record on CD-R disc once you've filled it up.
CD-RW discs have taken the idea of writable CDs a step further, building in an erase function so you can record over old data you don't need anymore. These discs are based on phase-change technology. In CD-RW discs, the phase-change element is a chemical compound of silver, antimony, tellurium and indium. As with any physical material, you can change this compound's form by heating it to certain temperatures. When the compound is heated above its melting temperature (around 600 degrees Celsius), it becomes a liquid; at its crystallization temperature (around 200 degrees Celsius), it turns into a solid.
In phase-change compounds, these shifts in form can be "locked into place": They persist even after the material cools down again. If you heat the compound in CD-RW discs to the melting temperature and let it cool rapidly, it will remain in a fluid, amorphous state, even though it is below the crystallization temperature. In order to crystallize the compound, you have to keep it at the crystallization temperature for a certain length of time so that it turns into a solid before it cools down again.
In the compound used in CD-RW discs, the crystalline form is translucent while the amorphous fluid form will absorb most light. On a new, blank CD, all of the material in the writable area is in the crystalline form, so light will shine through this layer to the reflective metal above and bounce back to the light sensor. To encode information on the disc, the CD burner uses its write laser, which is powerful enough to heat the compound to its melting temperature. These "melted" spots serve the same purpose as the bumps on a conventional CD and the opaque spots on a CD-R: They block the "read" laser so it won't reflect off the metal layer. Each non-reflective area indicates a 0 in the digital code. Every spot that remains crystalline is still reflective, indicating a 1.
As with CD-Rs, the read laser does not have enough power to change the state of the material in the recording layer -- it's a lot weaker than the write laser. The erase laser falls somewhere in between: While it isn't strong enough to melt the material, it does have the necessary intensity to heat the material to the crystallization point. By holding the material at this temperature, the erase laser restores the compound to its crystalline state, effectively erasing the encoded 0. This clears the disc so new data can be encoded.
CD-RW discs do not reflect as much light as older CD formats, so they cannot be read by most older CD players and CD-ROM drives. Some newer drives and players, including all CD-RW writers, can adjust the read laser to work with different CD formats. But since CD-RWs will not work on many CD players, these are not a good choice for music CDs. For the most part, they are used as back-up storage devices for computer files.

Dear all,
Thanks to those who posted a reply to my query re burning cds.For the record(!) I've been using songs imported to the Technics audio recorder,the cd recording software is Sonic'Record Now',(came with my new pc recently)and burnt onto TDK CD-R74 cd-recordable 650mb disks.I'm not giving up!
Cheers,David.

Does the CD play in any other players, does the blank CD mention music, Philips were a law unto themselves at one time. the make/type of disc can make a difference, a lot of new players will even play CD-RW's. Walter.