Audio CD Playback Problem

[Gillikins]

As a brand new Audacity user, am impressed by the knowledge & dedication displayed by the program developers - and users - and hope there is a fairly non-technical answer to my problem. My large cache of vinyl records is begging digitization - and Audacity seemed the solution. Have been able to make my 1st recording with Audacity (from newly purchased Pro-Ject III USB turntable), then produced an audio CD with Nero. However, the CD will play on my computer, but not on either of in-home stereos, where one produces silence, and t'other gives 'no disk' message, and ejection of the CD. Will be grateful for any suggestions, as this roadblock is holding up my launch of digitization project. I DID mark 'audio CD' whenever prompted to do so, and the disc info shows that it appears to be an audio CD.

[steve]

I DID mark 'audio CD' whenever prompted to do so,

Good, that is correct - not doing so is such a common mistake.

It is also important that you use a CDR (Recordable CD) and not a CDRW (re-writable CD).

Sometimes you will get write failures, or poor quality disks for no apparent reason. It is generally recommended to use branded disks, although I often use cheap unbranded ones and only have failures of about 1-2%. Occasional failures can also happen with branded disks, and you can be unlucky and get a whole pack of bad disks, though this is rare these days.

Some versions of Nero provide the option to "verify" the disk after it has been burned - you should select that option to allow Nero to check the data that it has "burned" onto the disk.

If you have the full version of Nero, it includes tools to check the quality of a disk. Poor quality disks may not be recognised by CD players.

Sometimes you will get CD players that will just not play home made CD's, but since you have tested on 2 CD players, that does not seem to be a likely cause.

The first thing to check is that you are using CDR's and not CDRW's.

[Gillikins]

Thanks for the feedback. Yes, I am using CD-R discs, as I had read that the CD-RW's are not accepted by some equipment. The discs which I purchased for this project are the Gold Archive quality MAM-A professional grade CD recordable disc (certified for use in ALL high speed CD writers).
Will try other brands (as soon as I can brave the storm & get out), and will use the 'verify' option on Nero - really don't remember seeing it when I
recorded this one, but am just at the beginning of this endeavor and it's all on the learning curve. Any further suggestions appreciated.

[waxcylinder]

Gillikins,

you may want to consider reducing the burn speed - IIRC I think you can do that in Nero, but it's been a while since I used it. This advice has been dispensed several times in other postings on the forum, so I'm guessing it may work for you. And do post back if you get it all working - as this helps other readers of the forum.

Even if it takes longer to burn, just go and make yerself a cuppa while Nero does its work for you ...

I would also recommend in addition to creating the CDs that you store as backup at least one set of the WAV files that you produce (I have two separate copies on two separate USB disks - separate folder per album). You will do a lot of work on this project - and you don't really want to lose it, do you?

BTW it would be better in the future if you posted in the appropriate section of the forum - it's divided up by users of the 1.2 stable releases and the 1.3 beta release - and then subdivided by operating system. That way you are more likely to get a response - this subsection is a far-flung star at the end of a long spiral arm of the Audacity galaxy - and not many folks pass by this section

WC

[steve]

you may want to consider reducing the burn speed

This does sometimes improve the burn quality, though not with all CD burners and not with all CD's.

The full version of Nero also has an option to test the writing speed before burning - this will sometimes help to reduce the number of "coasters" (beer mats).

Compatibility is much less of a problem with CD's these days than it used to be, but you will sometimes still find that a particular CD writer does not "like" a particular type of CD, even if both the writer and the CD are of good reputable quality.

[kozikowski]

Go buy a short stack of brand name disks that doesn't say "High Quality" on them, spelled in any way. HiQ disks, HiKwality...etc. I'm a fan of Sony DVD-R at home.

Do not let the burner decide what to do. I created several beer mats before I decided that screaming 48X, while entertaining to watch and listen to, just wasn't producing good disks. I found all the burn errors vanished at forced 16X.

We found it enormously valuable to own a complete piece of garbage CD (and DVD) player. This is the Quality Control player. If it plays on this thing, it will play anywhere. We have a very old Panasonic DVD player at work that does this job. It won't play anything that's not straight up and legal. At home, it's a very old Panasonic portable that is very particular about what it will play.

Scan is very unforgiving of bad disks. If you scan forward on your disks and the player gets lost, then you need to change something.

Koz