Playing Burned CD's in your 850

[Jush]

I want to know how this can be done,
I know Volvo's stereo is very picky and am wondering if there are any ways we can fool the stereo into reading the CD. I've been using iTunes to burn my CD's,I use primarily CD-r's and RW's, I can't remember the last time I've even seen just plain blank CD's. I'm thinking it may be the file type, but I'm not sure.. I'll experiment a bit, but does anyone know how to work around this?

-Josh

[rspi]

Hey Josh, try using "music" type disk. A lot of car CD players have issues playing home made CD's.

[Jush]

Thanks for the reply, but I'm not sure what you mean by "music" type disk, is there a certain type of CD or..?

-Josh

[erikv11]

It has nothing (or little) to do with the CD medium. That is, a "music" CD just has a different label on the package, it is just a 700 Mb CD-R. Any 700 Mb CD-R will do the job although I avoid the ultra-cheap ones.

The main issue is the file format that is burned onto the disk. Unlike e.g. a computer CD player that will interpret file format so that "any CD works," these older units can only deal with audio CDs. You can not burn files as mp3s or mp4s. You want to create an "audio CD" where the file format will be WAV files. This will limit you to about 80 minutes of audio per CD.

Any car CD player will accept audio CDs that are produced in this way.

The issue I have is different - all of my Volvo units have stopped playing CDs altogether. Commerical, homemade whatever they are (as expected) all treated the same by the player. They either get spit right back out or play a bit, then start skipping and eventually eject the CD. They are probably dirty or the laser is misaligned or something, I dunno. My daughter sure wishes I would figure it out.

[Jush]

So, would this be in the song files themselves, therefore making this impossible for me to accomplish?

[erikv11]

The software can easily convert among different file formats.

http://bit.ly/1ajlp9x

[matthew1]

Erik, I believe the burn format should be simply "audio CD" or whatever the software calls it.

Audio CDs do not use WAV as their sound format, using instead Red Book audio. The commonality is that both audio CDs and WAV files have the audio data encoded in PCM. WAV is a data file format for a computer to use that cannot be understood by CD players directly. To record WAV files to an Audio CD the file headers must be stripped and the remaining PCM data written directly to the disc as individual tracks with zero-padding added to match the CD's sector size. In order for a WAV file to be able to be burned to a CD, it should be in the 44100 Hz, 16-bit stereo format.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WAV

I don't have a problem when I use this iTunes setting:



Also, in the old days of ~2000-2001, certain brands of CD-recordable discs would work in my 850 (SC-816), and some would not. I don't remember what the distinction was... perhaps 74 minutes vs. 80 minutes capacity.

[precopster]

When some brands of CD work and some don't I always found that TDK brand was more reliable than others but I'm going back more than 12 years when I use to use Musicmatch Jukebox software.

It was the best audio software in its day with far better conversion to MP3 than Windows Media Player which would only convert to WMA format back then. Apple software was still in its infancy; boy have things changed.

Perhaps try the latest of Musicmatch and see if using this software improves things. You can still download Musicmatch Jukebox 10 for Win XP if you search for it.

[Mycinnie]

My cd player in my 850 will play any cd...but when I changed it to the high fidelity black one.it just spat them out after a few seconds..I record everything on Nero and didn't have this prob before changing the unit...

[paweladamicz]

My car doesn't accept any CD, It can play all of them, but I like to plug in AUX and play music on dzwonki mp3