Audacity Forum

Hi Folks,
I'm a newbie and 70 years old so bare with me. I couldn't find anything in FAQ so. I've been transferring my old tape cassettes into digital format in the hope that I could put my music onto CDs. I've managed to make both MP3 (which works good on a USB stick) and Wav formats but when I copied the WAV to a CD disc the disc doesn't play any sound in the CD player. The player says it plays MP3 which format I also tried but no joy. What am I doing wrong?
Kind Regards
Dave (In Germany)

Kiddorrigo wrote:but when I copied the WAV to a CD disc the disc doesn't play any sound in the CD player.

If I understood well your explanation, you should create an "audio cd" because by just copying the wav files will create a "data cd", it's like you copy documents on a cd disk but the music player doesn't know what to do with it.
What burning program did you use?

If I understood well your explanation, you should create an "audio cd" because by just copying the wav files will create a "data cd", it's like you copy documents on a cd disk but the music player doesn't know what to do with it.

As Audino stated, you have to use a CD burning program to move the Music files over to a CD. There are several great program out there that does that. I am also kinda new to this form so don't know if i can actuall suggest what programs to use so will not at this time. but i use one that i got for free off of the internet. I just google'd FREE CD BURNING PROGRAMS and D/L'ed one. it works great. with that propgram i have over 14 hours on one CD and still not full. Hope this helps, Marty

Also as a afterthought, Older and some newer CD players will not play music recorded on a DVD. It has to be recorded on a CD. Marty

You can do it on a BluRay, too, but neither of those will play in your car -- or you mum's music player.

A Music CD is a special format and you need a Music CD Authoring Program to get there. iTunes will do this on both Windows and Mac. Windows Media Player can do it, too, at least the more modern ones. Koz

Thats great folks,Thank you for the quick response. So It seems I'm on the right track then with the Wav extension thing. I'll try now to download and find a way to burn it and see how I go. I'll be back soon.
Kind Regards
Dave

Dave, all disc players are not created equally. Some won't even play home-made CD's that are "burned" they'll only play the commercially "pressed" ones.

A CD is normally in a special (MDA?) format and you need software which will take your WAV files or MP3 files and then "rip" or "burn" them to a CD, in CD format.

The smarter CD players will play "jukebox" discs (with more songs on them) and read MP3 and WAV files as well, with varying limits. They won't play DVDs, even "audio DVDs" as a rule, and if you find a player that DOES play music from DVDs, each one has different non-standard limits about how many files/folders/levels it can work with.

So if you must use CDs in a CD player, check for software that says it will MAKE A MUSIC CD and do the conversion on the fly for you. It may also give you a chance to enter track information, artist information, etc., because that is also handled in non-standard ways and does not necessarily get passed along.

Personally? I've given up on CDs, I'm converting everything to a high quality (VBR-2) MP3 format and using an MP3 player as my music source now. Actually, my phone, with a huge memory card in it. And I'll now expect everything to accept either an aduio plug from the phone, or a bluetooth stream (which is becoming common) instead of carrying around boxes of discs. Next year I suppose I may outgrow the phone's capacity, then it will be the 160GB iPod instead.

Being 70 is not the problem. The juvenile state of the music industry is!

Great, and thank you for that. I downloaded a burning program and it looks promising,it's getting late now so I'll leave it for now. I think that what Hellosailor has to say bears some thinking about. Perhaps there are audio systems on the market now where you just plug in a USB and it shows and plays your MP3 selection. If that's the case it would be well on the way to making all the other mediums redundent.
Thanks again
Kind Regards
Dave

Yes, and they're good to go until you drop your phone/iPod into the toilet. So there's all your addresses and music slowly sinking to the bottom.
I'd certainly like my older truck (lorry) to accept a connection from my iPod, but all it does is play Music CDs, so that's it for me for a while. The next one will do that. There is an impressive interface cable between the CD player and the radio behind the dash and I'm not that up to ripping it apart.

Yes, I do have a radio transmitter and I also live in Los Angeles which has no spacing between the FM stations.

The standing advice is convert your older music to high quality digital format like WAV or AIFF and then make protection backup copies of that. Then downconvert the quality to MP3 or whatever is current and put that on your personal music player. And keep putting it on newer and newer ones as you get them.

iPods can use MP3, but that's not normal.

Koz

Read the instructions for Windows Media. The last three or four Windows Media versions had the ability to burn music to a Music CD. You may not have to buy a thing. iTunes will do it, too. It's supported software and it's a free download from Apple.

http://www.apple.com/itunes/

Koz