Having issues ripping songs to my blank CDs

Winuser · Wednesday at 5:44 PM

spapakons said:
First CD-R discs were 74min, now 80min is the normal. 90min is very rare. All car CD players read audio CDs, but only those that have an MP3 or WMA logo can read a data CD-R with MP3 or WMA audio files. See the front, if there is no explicit logo, then probably only standard audio CDs are supported. To be 100% sure burn a standard audio CD, not data. I would burn both to test compatibility, but if there is no MP3 logo, then it is audio CD only.

Also use CD-R disks only (aka WORM, write once read many), very few players support rewritable CD-RW discs. And as I said, burn to 4x or even 2x. Avoid 8x or faster speeds for compatibility reasons. Needless to say you must avoid very cheap unknown brands, prefer well known brands such as TDK, Verbatim and the like.

If CD media is anything like DVD media, they don't have the quality that they use to have. It would be great if their car stereo had USB.

spapakons · Wednesday at 5:46 PM

Yet another reason to prefer good brands. To get the best available quality. Cost is very low anyway, why buy an unknown brand?

I remember when our family car still had a cassette player and we were preparing an audio tape with songs from various CDs to play on our trips. When I bought my first CD-RW drive, the burning application would let me burn as many tracks (songs) as I like before finalize the disc. So I could put another audio CD on the second drive and drag 'n' drop some songs to the partially recorded CD-R. When full, I finalized it. Does anyone knows if this is possible with modern applications like Nero? How?

Winuser · 2025-02-20T14:16:44-0500

spapakons said:
Yet another reason to prefer good brands. To get the best available quality. Cost is very low anyway, why buy an unknown brand?

I remember when our family car still had a cassette player and we were preparing an audio tape with songs from various CDs to play on our trips. When I bought my first CD-RW drive, the burning application would let me burn as many tracks (songs) as I like before finalize the disc. So I could put another audio CD on the second drive and drag 'n' drop some songs to the partially recorded CD-R. When full, I finalized it. Does anyone knows if this is possible with modern applications like Nero? How?

It's been awhile but as I remember it, unless it was a RW CD all files had to be written at the same time. I have a after market JVC radio in my Ford Explorer. Beside the AM & FM, it has Blue-Tooth, USB and believe it or not, a CD player. If I wanted too I could buy the adapter to listen to my subscription to SiriusXM music. I have used the USB on it. I've never used the CD player. I usually use the Blue-Tooth to stream my Spotify music from my phone to it. Yes I have a Spotify account and a basic SiriusXM account. Spotify is my main preference. I only kept the SiriusXM basic account because the radio in my Ram pickup truck defaults to SiriusXM. Without the account it plays the subscribe to SiriusXM channel. This way when I use the truck, the radio goes straight to my Classic Rock channel and not the subscribe to SiriusXM channel.

spapakons · 2025-02-20T15:10:35-0500

Yes, it is possible to burn music tracks on CD without finalizing, so you can add more any time until it is full. Hy first CD-RW drive was an HP and I used the HP suite bundled with it. The program to burn audio CDs allowed me to add as many audio tracks as I wanted without finalizing the disc. Once the disc was full I finalized it to be able to play the tracks on a common audio CD player. I think it might be possible with Nero Burning ROM, I will have a look and post back.

EDIT: I found it! You just uncheck the finalize disc option and you switch from disc-at-once to track-at-once write method. I don't have a blank CD-R to confirm it right now, but this should be it.

Rollback_Jockey · 2025-02-20T15:18:52-0500

Fabler2 said:
The car will have a CD player not a DVD player.

That's not universally true.

Rollback_Jockey · 2025-02-20T15:19:51-0500

Winuser said:
That's not the same as a car audio system.

In some cases it is.

Rollback_Jockey · 2025-02-20T15:22:44-0500

spapakons said:
If you don't see any MP3 or WMA logo, then probably the car radio plays only standard CD-DA discs.

My car has no such logo's yet will play any audio format, MP3, WAV, FLAC.

Winuser · 2025-02-20T15:28:43-0500

Rollback_Jockey said:
In some cases it is.

Unless it's a DVD player then yes it is. A CD player can not read a DVD.

spapakons · 2025-02-20T16:54:51-0500

Rollback_Jockey said:
My car has no such logo's yet will play any audio format, MP3, WAV, FLAC.

That's why I said to test a disc with MP3 files, in case of doubt. I am not sure if newer models don't have the MP3 logo because it is taken for granted that they support MP3 files, but earlier models did have that to advertise they were better than standard CD players. That they could also play MP3 or WMA discs. Probably newer models don't have to advertise it because it is common.

Rollback_Jockey · 2025-02-20T16:57:42-0500

Winuser said:
Unless it's a DVD player then yes it is. A CD player can not read a DVD.

That's not what i meant, i'm saying some car's do have a DVD player mechanism, usually used to play music but has a secondary use for updating vehicle maps.

spapakons · 2025-02-20T16:58:32-0500

Winuser said:
Unless it's a DVD player then yes it is. A CD player can not read a DVD.

Even if it is a DVD player, it might support MP3 files on CD-R, but not on DVD+R or DVD-R discs. You must do some tests to make sure what exactly it supports. I remember I had to press some key combination on the remote to show a secret menu and enable DivX and MP3 playback support on my standalone DVD player. The function was there but disabled by default.

You can also buy a Bluetooth receiver which transmits via FM frequency to add Bluetooth support to old car systems without Bluetooth. You connect your phone on the receiver and then select a radio frequency that is free of any station or at least has very low signal than can be masked by the receiver. Here in Greece these frequencies are 87.5MHz and 108MHz at the extremes of the FM band. Sometimes some station transmits there but if you set the volume of the smartphone to max, it can be masked and listen relatively clear. You then adjust the audio volume from your car stereo.

Rollback_Jockey · 2025-02-20T17:04:42-0500

spapakons said:
That's why I said to test a disc with MP3 files, in case of doubt. I am not sure if newer models don't have the MP3 logo because it is taken for granted that they support MP3 files, but earlier models did have that to advertise they were better than standard CD players. That they could also play MP3 or WMA discs. Probably newer models don't have to advertise it because it is common.

MP3 is pretty much the standard for vehicle players nowadays, don't forget its not the physical laser based mechanism that decides the formats it's the licensed codecs that are installed on the interpreter electronics. My car can be jailbroken to add video codecs so i can play video in the car.

idgat · 2025-02-20T17:04:59-0500

Audio discs in cars has long been problematic. Depending on the software to create the disc, one thing that was very common was the need to ensure the process of "closing" the disc after the burning process is complete

Note to OP @joob - you rip from a disc, you burn to a disc

Berton · 2025-02-20T17:07:09-0500

A couple of things, one is I have never seen a CD+R or CD+RW disc, my first ODD was a parallel-port attachment in '93. The other thing was mentioned early in this thread about ripping an audio disc, looking at the disc in File Explorer shows only a small file of about 1KB named Track01.cda, etc., not the actual music files. Ripping allows saving in more than one format, I prefer .mp3. If having .wma files or .wav files I convert using VLC. The .wav files usually are large.

spapakons · 2025-02-20T17:16:49-0500

Berton said:
A couple of things, one is I have never seen a CD+R or CD+RW disc, my first ODD was a parallel-port attachment in '93. The other thing was mentioned early in this thread about ripping an audio disc, looking at the disc in File Explorer shows only a small file of about 1KB named Track01.cda, etc., not the actual music files. Ripping allows saving in more than one format, I prefer .mp3. If having .wma files or .wav files I convert using VLC. The .wav files usually are large.

View attachment 125993

Back in my days (oh, oh, I sound like an old man now...) "rip" meant to copy the exact format without converting. This for an audio CD is PCM uncompressed 44100Hz 16-bit Stereo audio files. On a Windows computer they were typically saved as .WAV files. Ripping to MP3 means to rip and convert to MP3. In the early days (90's) not a single application could do everything. We had an application to rip the songs in .WAV files and then another application to convert the .WAV files to .MP3. If we wanted to create an audio CD from MP3 files, we could not just import them to the burning application. We had to convert the .MP3 files to uncompressed .WAV files and then import them to the burning application. The small hard disks of the era (less than 10GB) didn't help much to keep a large collection of songs, so we burned them to audio CDs to free valuable space.

Rollback_Jockey · 2025-02-20T17:22:25-0500

idgat said:
Audio discs in cars has long been problematic. Depending on the software to create the disc, one thing that was very common was the need to ensure the process of "closing" the disc after the burning process is complete

Note to OP @joob - you rip from a disc, you burn to a disc

That's covered by the rules of "The Redbook"

spapakons · 2025-02-20T17:30:42-0500

As far as I understand it, the audio CD has one temporary TOC (Table Of Contents) and one final TOC. When you burn some tracks, their location and duration are written on the temporary TOC. If you leave the session open, at the next burn the temporary TOC is copied to memory, you add tracks and then the temporary TOC is modified to include the new tracks. When you close the session (finalize the disc), the temporary TOC is copied to the final TOC and cannot be modified. A typical CD player looks at this final TOC to locate the tracks, so it cannot play an non-finalized disc because this is blank yet. A computer of course can read the temporary TOC and let you listen to the tracks (or see the files in case of a multisession data disc). There is also an old Nero addon for File Explorer that lets you read whatever session you want from a multisession disc. So if you accidentally deleted some files from a data disk, you can load an earlier TOC and copy them. Without it File Explorer has access only to the last session TOC.

Winuser · 2025-02-21T10:15:16-0500

spapakons said:
You can also buy a Bluetooth receiver which transmits via FM frequency to add Bluetooth support to old car systems without Bluetooth. You connect your phone on the receiver and then select a radio frequency that is free of any station or at least has very low signal than can be masked by the receiver.

I remember those days. What a pain when driving long distances. I had to keep changing the radio channel.

spapakons · 2025-02-21T10:30:44-0500

An alternative I used was a small JBL Go Bluetooth speaker. I connected the phone to the speaker and then I placed somewhere near me. The audio quality was much better and the volume was much higher than my phone speaker, so I could clearly hear it through road noise. Not as good as hearing from the car speakers, but a good substitute without the interference heard from the Bluetooth to FM transmitter.

badrobot · 2025-02-21T10:48:57-0500

2 decades ago, when I was still burning MP3s to a CD, I found that maximizing burn speeds is prone to errors and make the CD unreadable. Not sure what your burning speeds are but this is just for information. Like people use to say... "slowly but surely".

Having issues ripping songs to my blank CDs

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