Why do the CDs I burn work in my car CD player but not on my portable player or Nakamichi CD alarm/radio?

Posted by admin in Thursday, December 25th 2008

HomeSweetSiliconValley asked:

I use Win XP and Windows Media Player to burn backups of my CDs. This works fine for playing on my car stero system. But it’s a no-go on my portable CD player and my Nakamichi wakeup CD player. My car player doesn’t play mp3 files so I’m sure it’s burning to standard CD format. Any thoughts?
Thanks. I just opened one of the disks in Explorer and the files are .cda. A friend of mine burns CDs in his computer and I am able to play those. Another theory I have is that I bought Internet CD RWs and either the quality or the RW is preventing the playing.

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3 Comments

Greg S said in December 25th, 2008 at 4:42 pm

If all of them are reasonably new, the Cds should play! Really old CD players may not play CDs burned on a computer.

galgor87 said in December 27th, 2008 at 8:39 am

Maybe your stereos dont play CD-Rs

the_amazing_purple_dave said in December 27th, 2008 at 7:25 pm

The three basic CD formats (-ROM, -R, and -RW) are all used to store the same type of information, but physically the three formats are quite different. A player designed specifically for CD-ROMs (including music CDs) will not always be able to read CD-Rs or finalized CD-RWs. Likewise, the players that were specifically designed to work with CD-Rs might not be able to do anything with finalized CD-RWs. Unfinalized CD-RWs will always require a computer drive and CD-burning software with CD-RW functionality (all current CD and DVD burners should include this). Additionally, to play them on a standalone player (i.e. not a computer drive), they usually have to be formatted as a music CD, not just a CD full of MP3 files. It sounds like you’ve got them formatted correctly, but your hardware isn’t capable of reading anything but pressed originals. It still might be the format, which you could check by opening one of your CD-Rs as a standard folder on your computer. If they’re all MP3 format, then obviously your car stereo does play them. If they’re CDA format, then it was encoded as a standard music CD (and it’s very likely a hardware issue), and if it’s encoded as anything else then it’s still a format issue…just not one that has anything to do with the MP3 format.