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Life Spencer on December 19, 2009 12:05 pm

Recordable CD Woes

We are about to embark on a long trip across the mountains for Christmas.  For the last few months (on and off, but more off lately) I’ve worked to create MP3 and WMA versions of all of our music on our CD’s.  The purpose for the two formats is fairly simple; MP3 is a bit more accurate and WMA is smaller so more can fit on a data CD.

I had run some tests a while back of burning WMA discs to use in our mini-van and they worked well.  Now that we are about to go on a trip and I have completed ripping all of our CD’s I wanted to burn the WMA files to discs to take on the trip.  Great idea but one issue: the brand of CD-R I bought don’t match those I tested with…

I have long heard that different media can have trouble in different players, but I really thought we would be past those days.  Apparently not.  I don’t know if I’ll be able to for this trip or not, but in order to try again, I’ll have to buy a different brand (preferably those that tested well before).  I’ve gone through 5 discs burning different ways to get a playable one without success.  I’ve been using the same burner so I know that isn’t the issue.

If I do go buy another set, I’ll let you all know how that plays out.

UPDATE:  Now we’re trying plan ‘B’… using our MP3 players instead.  This had some drawbacks as over time and moves I had lost the AC charger for my MP3 player and we can’t find the USB cable to charge/transfer on Kylah’s iPod.  We also didn’t have just a straight through stereo cable to plug into the AUX jack in the van.  Luckily, Fry’s Electronics is the best store ever!  I was able to get a new charger/transfer cable for the iPod, a universal AC adapter with the proper connection for my MP3 player and the straight through cable.

I’m currently charging my MP3 player and have downloaded our entire music collection to it.  After the charge is complete, I’ll test it out in the car and hopefully we’ll be good to go.

3 Responses to “Recordable CD Woes”

  1. on December 19, 2009 at 5:09 pm 1. B.J. Stanton said …

    I feel your pain. I encountered parallel problems some time ago when I was exploring the various ways of converting and saving old home movies to DVD. To make a long story short, I have not discovered a solution with enough robustness to play regardless of DVD player, PC, or OS. ;-(

  2. on December 19, 2009 at 6:00 pm 2. Spencer said …

    Well, I just bought another spindle of CD’s and they had the same result too… they didn’t have my original test brand unfortunately so I doubt I’ll be able to try again before we leave. These get to go back to the store tomorrow.

  3. on December 20, 2009 at 5:48 am 3. B.J. Stanton said …

    Bummer.

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