i have a problem with my CDs i'm burning

[benny1548132]

so, over the holidays, i got some Verbatim CDs as a gift, plus a disk drive for burning. i want to know if this is a problem with the disk drive itself, a 2025 Hitachi-LG Slim Portable DVD Writer that apparently works with CDs too -- or the CD player, a 2013 Jensen, or if i can fix it?: i burnt a couple CDs. my CD player wouldn't play them, even though it plays Verbatim CDs generally. i really, really love having a CD player, i want to be able to use it with my own mixtapes and such. someone told me to burn on the lowest speed possible, so i tried that next, and it still wouldn't play. what could be happening?

[Dequake]

Hello! Could you include some specs? Like what program you use, and the specidic parameters within that program? Hopefully I can maybe try and recreate your problem on my end, with my own cd reader.

[benny1548132]

Hello! Could you include some specs? Like what program you use, and the specific parameters within that program? Hopefully I can maybe try and recreate your problem on my end, with my own cd reader.

WMP/Windows Media Player

and i don't know what you mean by parameters. i put it on the lowest burn speed.

[Dan Q]

There's a few tricks you might need to check on:

• Make sure you're writing CD Audio (sometimes knows as "red book" audio). Many pieces of media software default to writing actual files to CDs (making a CD that's full of e.g. MP3 files, which isn't the same thing and can't be played by regular CD players).
• Make sure the CD only contains CD audio. It's possible to make hybrid CDs that contain both audio tracks and files, but it's tricky. Audio CD players usually won't play an audio CD unless the first track is an audio track, so if you write files to a CD and then write "red book" audio, then you're in for a bad time.
• Make sure you close the session: many audio CD players can't play CDs with "open sessions". An open session is one where you can continue to add to the CD. For these audio CD players (and it's many of them!) you need to ensure that the session gets "closed" (i.e. you can't write to the CD any more). How you do this depends on the software you're using, but it's usually a checkbox or something.
• Make sure you're using CD-Rs.. There are a couple of different standards for writeable CDs. CD-R is the dominant and most-compatible one. Many audio CD players can't handle reading rival media of the rival CD+R standard, for example.
• Some audio CD players just can't play, CD-Rs, unfortunately. They're pretty rare nowadays, though; it was mostly the early ones! The reason is that the 'grooves' in a "pressed" CD are deeper and more-visible than the markings made by a writer's laser on CD-R media.

Hopefully that'll help you. The key things to check first are (a) that you're writing CD Audio and (b) that you're closing the session.

[Dequake]

Dan Q to the rescue!!!

But ok! I think I will try to recreate your issue on my side sometime this week, see if it makes me any smarter. In the meantime, maybe try a different program? Exact Audio Copy is the one I use for everything. Plenty of guides and lots of ways to tweak it to your liking!

[MediocreMetastasis]

I made a cd comapatability guide a while ago on my site that helps you see what type of cds can be used in certain cd players that you can view here. This guide wont help you if it's a issue with burning the cd. You might have a cd player that can't play CD-RW (unlikely with a cd player from 2013 but not impossible) and CD-RW discs. I'm not sure since not enough info was given. If your cd-player supports mp3 I suggest you burn mp3 onto the disc to maximise the amount of music you can have on one disc (i was able to fix 100 songs on one disc which is 300 minutes of music instead of 80 for normal music burning).

Some audio CD players just can't play, CD-Rs, unfortunately.

If the cd player from 2013 can't play CD-Rs god help us

[Dan Q]

If the cd player from 2013 can't play CD-Rs god help us

You'd be amazed.

Here's a fun thing: I used to modchip Nintendo GameCubes which was useful for playing backups, imports, and homebrew. But if you want to load that media from an optical disc then there were several interesting challenges that Nintendo put in the way.

Firstly, the GameCube used a non-standard (physical) size of CD. They were small! So if you wanted to write to standard off-the-shelf CD-Rs, you needed to also replace the case of the GameCube with one that could fit regular-sized discs into it. The laser still couldn't read all the way to the edge, but that was okay, because you'd just write to the middle-two-thirds anyway.

Secondly: the GameCube motor span backwards compared to a regular CD drive! You could work around this by rewiring your CD writer so it span backwards too, but the alternative (which was easier) was to write your images to a file then use a special program to re-organise the bits into reverse order, and then write it "raw" to your CD-R. Still: an extra hurdle!

Finally: the laser was on most units calibrated to only be sensitive enough to read "pressed" discs and not "writable" ones! You could work around this by lifting out the laser unit, finding a potentiometer on the back, and giving it about an eighth to a quarter turn to decrease its resistance, "boosting" the laser. Actually, this is a useful trick to "rescue" elderly GameCubes that have stopped reading discs properly: it can give them a whole new lease on life.

Aaaanyway... the reason I mention all of this is that I suspect the same potentiometer trick would work on many audio CD players that can't handle writable media, for the same reason. Open them up, find the resistor on the laser's power circuit, and either reduce its resistance a touch (if it's a variable resistor) or else swap it out for a slightly lower one. I've never tried this, but I reckon it would work!

But yeah, @MediocreMetastasis: it's probably not that.