Don’t throw Old CD player you can still play new MP3 music files

Trick to play new MP3 files in your Old car/home CD player

You have some MP3 files (.mp3 files) those one you can play on your computer, but after burning them to a CD they do not work in old car or home CD player.

Sometimes when you try to play they will eject from CD player.

What can go wrong?

Problem # 1

You may have created a data disc rather than an audio disc. Data disc can be created by using drag and drop in any disk recording software.

 

Problem #2.

Some old car CD players do not support MP3 file format. So when you burn them to a CD, choose to create an Audio Disc or Audio CD. It will create the type of files and directory structures that will be recognized by Audio CD players such as the one in your car.

Problem #3

Another point worth mentioning is that don't use re-writeable disc to burn the Audio disc. Use read-only disk instead. Some car CD players can't play Audio CD created by re-writeable disks.

 

What is Audio CD?

For Audio CD, if you look at the disk on your computer in Windows Explorer, you'll see files with .cda file extension. Strictly speaking, .cda isn't a real computer file because all of them have only 1KB in size. People designed .cda files as simply a way to make the computer displaying them in Windows Explorer so that you are able to see them. You can consider them as pointers to the actual .wav files on the disc, similar to the way how Shortcut works in Windows Explorer.

If you copy and paste .cda files from your disk to the computer hard drive, and then remove the disk from the CD, the computer will report that the relevant CD is not available. This is because .cda is not a real file but a pointer.

Please note that Audio CD is time-based, not size based. You will only be able to fit 80 minutes of audio onto the disk.

Happy burning!

More info CD players

They will only play Cd's that are encoded into audio Cd's. You cannot make it play any type of data Cd's. When you take a program like Windows Media Player, and take your Mp3's and other audio formats, it can burn those files to a format that a standard CD player can read. (Which is the PCM 16-bit 44,100 raw data stream?) When you rip a CD onto your computer in a lossless format, Windows will rip the music files into the (Wav) container. Audio Cd's don't have an actual container. When your CD player reads the disk, it is reading a data stream called PCM or (Pulse code modulation) Wav is the official lossless container that holds the digital information in it, in order for you to work with the file within Windows. Only can a data CD actually hold audio codecs like Mp3, Wav, Flac, AIff, AAC etc... An audio encoded CD will only hold 12-15 songs. But if you burn a CD as a data CD, instead of an audio CD, then you could hold as much as 100 songs on it if you went with Mp3 for example. So in other words, your CD player will only play store bought Cd's, or audio Cd's that you burn. It will not play Cd's that were burned as data discs. There is nothing else that you can do, to make it play anything else other then standard every day Cd's.

 

Newer stereo CD players, as well as many newer car radios, are compatible with Wav, Mp3, AAC, and Wma. (data Cd's) The only difference between a audio CD, and a data CD is how a disc is burned.

Happy burning!