Help me! I need music!

I am annoyed. All of a sudden my car CD player won't play recently copied CDs. It will play my old copied CDs fine, but won't play anything I have copied in the last couple of days. Why?! Is it because I changed my brand of CD-R because Sony discs were half price in Sainsburys?? This seems totally illogical but I can't see anything else has changed, unless Windows Media Player has secretly imploded and isn't copying them properly. Help me! I need music!

The answer to this CD FAQ is really quite simple. Your taste in music has become so mixed up that your car doesn't know whether it's coming or going. So it's stopped in it's tracks. Like we have.

Actually, that's not quite true, we were just muted and on pause for a while. We realise this is always a frustrating problem. A CD that's burned on one machine will play fine in another, and won't play in a third. 

Why won't the burned CD play?

Assuming you've done the basic troubleshooting like making sure your CD player's laser hardware is clean, cleaning your CD, verifying it's scratch-free, et cetera, there can be several reasons for this problem:

• You forgot to select an "Audio" CD type when burning, and instead chose to burn a "Data" CD. Data-formatted CDs can not be read in a standard CD player.
  
  
• You burned to a CD-RW format CD. Most CD players will not read a CD-RW format. Use a CD-R format instead.
  
  
• Your player may not like the CD format. What size CD-R are you using? If you're using a 700MB capacity CD, try burning to a 650MB CD. Some players don't play well when given a disk capacity they're not expecting. Also try lowering the recording speed. Some car CD players will be fine with a CD burned using a 2x speed, but won't like using the same media recorded at 8x.
  
  
• You have an older-generation CD player (more likely) or CD burner (less likely). Older hardware doesn't always talk with newer hardware. If you have, for example, an older CD player in your car, it gets confused by the language contained on the young whippersnapper CD. Think of it as an "electronic generation gap". The solution in this case, sadly, is to get a replacement for your car's player.

FAQnote:
We have been reliably informed that the Sony discs needed to have a muse at their new environment for a couple of days and then they played fine.

Share

top ↑