Thursday, 02 May 2019
I made an audio CD and it plays ok on my PC but won’t play on my stereo – why?
Various possible reasons:
1) You recorded it on a CD-RW disk. Most newer computer drives read these fine. Very few audio players will read them at all.
2) You recorded the CD as a data CD or as a multi-session CD. Audio players will only read audio CDs, and even on audio CDs, they will only recognise the first «session». Computer drives, OTOH, can cheerfully read data CDs, and can read CDs recorded in multiple sessions.
3) If neither of the above is your problem, it may just be that the brand of CDR disk you are using does not work well with your audio player. This happens sometimes. Try a different brand. I have had no problems with Kodak, Sony, Samsung, or Fuji disks, whereas I have had some problems with Memorex, Maxell and noname disks (Maxell seemed OK at first, but the last box I bought were bad…).
4) Another thing to try is to burn at a slower speed. Try burning a disk at 1x (rather than 2x or 6x or whatever speed your burner drive supports). Sometimes audio CDs burned at slower speeds will work in audio players whilst disks burned at higher speeds won’t – I think that the laser encoding is somehow «clearer» when burning at slower speeds and this helps audio players, which often have a problem with home-burned CDs, to cope with the disks.
5) If your CD won’t play at all, this probably isn’t your problem… but another tip is to try and record all your audio CDs in «disk at once» mode, meaning the whole disk is burned in one pass without turning off the laser. Audio players like disks burned like this better. If you burn the disk «track at a time» the laser is turned off between each track, and audio players often cannot find any track other than the first one on such disks, although if you just start them playing at the first track and leave them, they’ll usually play all the way through fine.
