Song wont burn to cd

[alliedforces]

Hey,
When i try to burn some mp3s to a audio cd they wont burn onto the cd. There is just an empty space on the burned cd that is blank. The cd player(computer & Home unit)shows the time remaining but there is no sound. Can anyone help with this problem ? Thanks G

[marvinbarcelona]

Need some more information, mate.

Wehn you say shows the time remaining, do you mean how long the song is?

[alliedforces]

Yea, The track shows the full time of the song but on the cd there is a blank space where the data should be read.

[eleet-2k2]

Where'd you get the mp3s from? What program did you use to decompress them? What program did you use to burn them?

Try copying the mp3s, going over to a friend's house and burning it there, cuz it could just be the way you did it/your software.

[Smeggle]

would need to know system/software specs first but I suspect not finalizing the cd.....

me did that a couple of times and * coughs* same prob as ye have wouldn't play Tracks showed, time remain showed but pure blissfull silence other wise...






Currently Listening to -:|:- Ralph McTell -|- The Streets of London -:-

[alliedforces]

I downloaded them from Napster many moons ago. I am using EzCdCreator 5.0. The problem is that certain songs wont burn to a cd, There is a blank space on the disc when the song should be. Example I burned a cd from mp3s with 20 songs on it, Tracks 1-10 were fine but track 11 didnt burn to the cd, there is a blank area on the cd where the track should be. Tracks 12-20 burned fine. Also on any cd player I put the disc into track 11 shows up but is silent. Maybe the song is Copyrited and I am unable to burn it to cd. I have never had this problem before. I also tried to burn the cd using two different brands of cd's. TDK and Pioneer....

I have a P4 2.8mgz
windows XP
1 gig of ram

[horse-fly]

perhaps changine the mp3's to wav, and burn those with nero or something other than EZCD *shivers*

[Namelessv1]

Originally posted by Horse-Fly
perhaps changine the mp3's to wav, and burn those with nero or something other than EZCD *shivers*

You've had bad experiences with ezcdcreator, too, Horse-Fly?

[horse-fly]

well... when something has the word "easy" or "EZ"... you know your in for a rough time

[m0e]

The .mp3 file that won't record, will it play from the hard drive on your computer? If it plays all the way to the end of the song you might have a problem with some sort of copy protection. If the song doesn’t play all the way to the end' the file is corrupted, just delete it and forget about it.
As for ECDC 5, I have used it for about 4 years now, on I don’t know how many different machines, at least 4 or 5 different brands of CD burners, and more than a dozen different brands of media, with no significant problems. I’ve made a couple of coasters over the years, but mostly because of operator error, nothing I could blame on Easy CD Creator. Now Easy CD & DVD Creator 6, that’s a completely different story.

[InvisableMan]

i dont believe this thread should be allowed to die without being answered, i've never encountered this uniqe problem before, and i would be interested to see a solution.

[matt_69]

Originally posted by Horse-Fly
perhaps changine the mp3's to wav, and burn those with nero or something other than EZCD *shivers*

if ur using nero it automatically make thes mp3's playable so u wouldn't need to convert them.

-matt

[Smeggle]

Originally posted by m0e
The .mp3 file that won't record, will it play from the hard drive on your computer? If it plays all the way to the end of the song you might have a problem with some sort of copy protection. If the song doesn’t play all the way to the end' the file is corrupted, just delete it and forget about it.
As for ECDC 5, I have used it for about 4 years now, on I don’t know how many different machines, at least 4 or 5 different brands of CD burners, and more than a dozen different brands of media, with no significant problems. I’ve made a couple of coasters over the years, but mostly because of operator error, nothing I could blame on Easy CD Creator. Now Easy CD & DVD Creator 6, that’s a completely different story.

Agrees. I use easy cd creator and never had a problem apart from as you say operater error (Basically Forgeting to Finalyse)

@alliedforces
If it's as you say, recording all the other tracks and not this one, the only reason I can figure is the track is corrupted. I'd say get your self another copy of it.

very much doubt it being copy righted material problems , as you say you got it a while ago, so can't see it being that. Has to be a corrupted data and switching it into different formats won't help as all you'll be doing is switching the data corruption as well, or so I'd suspect.

sorry, Can't see a fix on this one :(

[alliedforces]

Moe: The mp3 songs play just fine in Winamp,Wmp and Real one players but for some reason wont record to a cdr. These mp3s were downloaded a long time ago before and copy protection was added to cds.

Hey guys thanks for the help. I also have been using EZ for years and this is the first time this ever happened to me. The cd looks like a vinyl album with a space in between the songs, but the space has the time data on it, it is not blank just now music. Let me try MusicMatch and see what happens.Thanks for the Help G

[m0e]

Strange, the only time I have burned mp3’s to audio CD’s and had songs that wouldn’t play I have gone back to the source mp3 and found it corrupted. But the CD itself didn’t have any visible flaws. After making a couple of coasters this way I now listen to the last 5% of each song before I make my compilation CD’s. I haven’t had any problems like this since I started doing that.
Just as an experiment I might try trans-coding the mp3 in question to another format, .wav or some lossless format, and then try to burn that file to disk. I know there will be a loss in quality but it might be an interesting experiment to see what happens, and if these are songs not easily found it might be a way to save them for future use.

[alliedforces]

Moe The problem seems to bve with Ez cd creator, I started using MusicMatch to burn the cd and have not had any problems. I must have burned of 300 cd with all versions of ez cd creator and this was the first time I ever had this problem. Thanks for the help, I will try to turn the problem mp3s to wavs and try to burn them that way....Thanks G

[ScorLibran]

Originally posted by m0e
Just as an experiment I might try trans-coding the mp3 in question to another format, .wav or some lossless format, and then try to burn that file to disk. I know there will be a loss in quality but it might be an interesting experiment to see what happens, and if these are songs not easily found it might be a way to save them for future use.
There will be no loss in sound quality transcoding from MP3 to lossless. Lossless is bit perfect with the source your encoding from. It's a mis-stated saying that "transcoding is bad" in general. Transcoding from lossy-to-lossy is the only thing that's bad for sound quality.

Anyway, my vote goes for checking your CD-ROM (or CD-R/RW) drivers. I've had a problem similar to yours, and it was my CD drivers that needed uninstalling and reinstalling to fix it (via Control Panel).

Not finalizing the disc is a consideration, but if it's not able to play even on your PC, then this likely isn't the problem. Most PC's can read/play un-finalized CD-R/RWs just fine...it's portables that usually need finalized discs (and not even all of those do).

[m0e]

Originally posted by ScorLibran
There will be no loss in sound quality transcoding from MP3 to lossless. Lossless is bit perfect with the source your encoding from. It's a mis-stated saying that "transcoding is bad" in general. Transcoding from lossy-to-lossy is the only thing that's bad for sound quality.


It’s my understanding that all digital recording has some loss in sound quality. That is just the nature of it; after all, they do call it a “sample rate”. Just as analog recording is limited in accuracy by the mechanical limitations of the recording equipment, digital recording does not capture every sound wave sent to the encoder. Depending on the encoder used it processes the sound waves and encodes the information it “thinks” is important. Then the decoder takes that info and “guesses” as to what sound it needs to fill in the blanks on playback. Basically what I am saying is all digital music is compressed. So going from sounds recorded using one audio encoder and then decoding and recoding to another audio format should result in a loss of sound quality.
Now I could be wrong, it’s not like I have any formal training in this, just an interest in how all things work.

[squall14716]

Lossless formats compress the audio, not encode it. It's like putting a txt file in a .zip archive, the file size of the txt file decreases, but nothing is lost. Am I right here, or do I not know what I'm talking about?

[ScorLibran]

Originally posted by m0e
It’s my understanding that all digital recording has some loss in sound quality. That is just the nature of it; after all, they do call it a “sample rate”. Just as analog recording is limited in accuracy by the mechanical limitations of the recording equipment, digital recording does not capture every sound wave sent to the encoder.True regarding the structure of digital recording. But there have been nauseatingly long debates with scientists and codec developers from all over the world about the definition of "lossless". I was in a debate recently as a matter of fact on this very topic with several such people. I'll post the link as soon as I can access it.

When I say "lossless is bit-perfect from the source audio", the source audio I'm referring to is the MP3 file (within the topic of this thread, anyway). A FLAC (or WAV) will have perfectly identical sound quality and bit preservation as the source it comes from. You're instead talking about the source of the originally recorded sound, many levels before the MP3 was encoded.

Air vibration (or electric impulse) --> ADC (unless the source is digital) --> recording device --> WAV format (for PC) --> encoding into target compressed format. There is a natural loss with ADC (with sampling, as you point out), but no other until you encode to a lossy format. The ADC loss though, is FAR from audible for anything CD-level (44.1kHz) or higher, so it's audibly lossless.

Originally posted by m0e
Depending on the encoder used it processes the sound waves and encodes the information it “thinks” is important. Then the decoder takes that info and “guesses” as to what sound it needs to fill in the blanks on playback. Basically what I am saying is all digital music is compressed. So going from sounds recorded using one audio encoder and then decoding and recoding to another audio format should result in a loss of sound quality.
Now I could be wrong, it’s not like I have any formal training in this, just an interest in how all things work. The first sentence in this quote only applies to psychoacoustic encoding (lossy formats like MP3, Ogg Vorbis, MPC, AAC, and others). FLAC is not a psychoacoustic format, and does not drop any part of the audio stream, whether you can hear it or not. It does encode (by defining frames, using predictive encoding methods, stereo mode encoding, etc.), but it loses not a single bit of the original source audio. (Again, "source audio" = CD, or WAV, or wherever you encoded the FLAC from...not the musicians playing live or in a studio, which is long before the encoding chain.)

Not all digital music is compressed. A digital recording originally captured at 44,100 samples per second, at a bit-depth of 16 bits, and with 2-channels = 1411kbps, and is indeed uncompressed (after ADC/sampling, anyway). You can compress losslessly to about 60% of the uncompressed file size (+ or -), but lower than that requires dumping bits with either simple quantization encoding (ref: WavPack hybrid, OptimFrog), or more commonly with psychoacoustic encoding. Audio recorded with one audio encoder, decoded, and then re-encoded to another format will NOT result in an inherent loss of sound quality IF the target format is lossless. The final encoding will perfectly equal, bit-for-bit, the first file in this chain. Any perceived sound quality loss using a lossless target is absolutely placebo, and in fact this is how placebo is baselined...how I can "test" to see if you're only thinking you hear a difference where none exists. (Believe me, I've gone through hundreds of hours of such baselining and then ABX testing and research on this.)

Originally posted by squall14716
Lossless formats compress the audio, not encode it. It's like putting a txt file in a .zip archive, the file size of the txt file decreases, but nothing is lost. Am I right here, or do I not know what I'm talking about?Lossless formats do encode the audio in the course of compression (ref: my discussion above on this part). FLAC, Monkey's Audio, LA, WavPack Lossless, and all the others (AFAIK) use an encoding algorithm to compress the target file, but are still fully lossless. Test: Extract a track from CDA to Raw PCM WAV. Encode to FLAC (any setting). Decode back to Raw PCM WAV. Checksum the original WAV and the second WAV. The checksum will prove the files are fully indentical. You're right that lossless encoders also work a lot like *.zip or *.rar, but they do additional encoding to maximize compression of audio. Test: Take a PCM WAV file and Zip a copy. Then FLAC a copy. The FLAC will be much smaller, because of its encoding algorithm. So it's more than just "compression".

--- I want to reference some discussions I've been involved in with the people who actually design and develop all these encoding formats (FLAC, MP3, Vorbis, MPC, ...) and utilities, but the site's server is down right now. I'll post them when it's back up. ---

[m0e]

@ ScorLibran
Well, I’m not trying to get onto an argument or dispute what your saying. As I read it I think it makes sense, but I still have a hard time believing/understanding how an encoded and compressed audio signal could be completely lossless. At least any format that something as slow as my computers (single processors, 1.8ghz and slower) could process. Once again I’m not trying to dispute what you’re saying, it’s just that I don’t fully understand it yet. But your post definitely intrigues me. In searching the web for more info on FLAC I found that VW makes a media player for my Jetta that supports FLAC and the band Primus has soundboard recordings in the FLAC format available for download from their website (for a very reasonable price). I just wish I still had access to some Martin Logan’s or Wilson Grand Slam’s to hear what the difference would be like between the standard CD format, the SACD and DVD-Audio formats, and a directly to FLAC recording. Thanks for the info, it always makes my day better when I can actually learn something new.

[ScorLibran]

@m0e: Oh we're not debating....just sharing. :) (Sorry if I came off like I was "debating"....been sparring with the g/f today...I guess I'm stuck in that mode :rolleyes: )

Think of audio encoding or decoding as a stream. You processor has a speed and bandwidth limit, but when doing lossless encoding, all the same data will be encoded/compressed, regardless of speed. Just as you'd get the exact same file downloading slowly with a 56k modem, or quickly with a (1.5mbps) T1 line. Lossless encoding (or any encoding, really) will take longer on a slower PC, but you'll always get the exact same (perfect) result. One nice thing about FLAC in particular is that it has an "internal checksum" that it does after encoding to confirm the perfection of the target file. No need to keep an MD5 file beside each track like with Shorten.

Hydrogenaudio is still down for maintenance, so it may be tomorrow before I can post those links I promised. We've had some really good talks there about all this.

For the best research on FLAC (or anything else about digital audio...period), try here (http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/). And the FLAC player for your VW is very likely the PhatBox (by PhatNoise). I've got one in my car, too, 60 GB. I'm a frequent-posting member in their forum, and kind of a sound-quality advocate there as well, trying to share the knowledge I've built over the years, and learn from others at the same time. Here's (http://www.phatnoise.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?s=&forumid=6) the link to their forum.

And here's a secret, if you want *really* good sound quality...with lossless encoding, gain adjustment, deglitching and waveform tweaking, you can get truly and measurably better than CD-quality audio. I don't mean high-bitrate-MP3-better-than-CD-quality, I mean better-than-released-from-the-studio quality. Now, that's not to say that high-bitrate MP3 isn't already transparent, but if you need archival-level and source-transcode-level file quality, you can actually improve what the engineers put onto a CD. I've done it on several dozen of my albums recently, and I'm still far from being a pro. You'd be amazed at how many pressing and/or mastering errors get released. And you'd be amazed at the tools that are available to the average person to fix it all. There's not much that can't be repaired. Some tools to do it cost money, but the majority are F*R*E*E. :)

[m0e]

Originally posted by ScorLibran
@m0e: Oh we're not debating....just sharing. :) (Sorry if I came off like I was "debating"....been sparring with the g/f today...I guess I'm stuck in that mode :rolleyes: )


Not the impression I got at all, I was just clarifying my intent.

The VW media player is indeed a PhatBox, which looks very similar to the Kenwood Music Keg I was looking at getting before my Excelon player took a dump. VW only offers a 20gig cartridge (hard drive) though, which would be too small for what I would want. I will have to investigate this some more another time; it’s getting late here.

I have been to Hydrogenaudio many times researching different things but doing a google search for FLAC the first response was for the Sourceforge page for FLAC. From there I just clicked on a couple of links but I will read up on this some more in the next couple of days.

To this point I have mostly looked at digital media storage more as a convenience than an improvement over analog. I originally started storing songs on the computer as a way to conveniently access the vinyl albums I have that were never released on CD. Then I used a file sharing service to try and replace some of my music after about 150 of my CD’s were stolen and my (s***-for-brains) insurance company refused to reimburse me for the loss. When I started to realize that you could get good quality sound from mp3’s I saw the possibility of having a central location to store and listen to all of my music, all accessed with a few keystrokes. I am in the process of ripping my entire CD collection (at my leisure) finding the higher average VBR mp3’s to be a good compromise between sound quality and storage space. With the medium quality sound system I have (mostly 15 year old stuff, Carver (when Bob was still running the show) preamp and amps, Klipsh speakers, Denon, Nakamichi, and my PC as source hardware) I’m not sure how much of a difference better encoding would do for me. But I’m always interested in finding out how much better my system can sound. I’ve listened to enough $60,000-$170,000 stereo systems to know that even subtle differences can be amazing to the right listener. And totally lost on the average one.

And I am not surprised by the amount of pressing/mastering mistakes that are released. Those things always make me think “why aren’t I the one making money as a recording engineer instead of the bozo who missed that”.

[ScorLibran]

@m0e: You can still put a 60GB DMS cartridge in the VW PhatBox. All sizes of cartridges work in all PhatBoxes and all Music Kegs...firmware updates from PhatNoise make this work. If you talked to a saleperson that didn't know of any larger DMS sizes than 20GB, have them call PhatNoise and they (and you) can get hooked up with the larger DMS, based on what you want to spend.

Anything you want to know about FLAC that you can't find via the links you've got already, let me know (either by post or PM). I've used FLAC since its early incarnations, and have got tons of info on it, from the basics to the full encoding specification, and anything in between.

Re: Sound quality...you're definitely right that high-bitrate MP3 provides sound quality well above the bar. (Something I think I was misleading on was that) I don't use lossless to improve listening quality, but rather as (1) archival, and (2) the source for repeated transcoding to many other formats. I just need a "clean starting point", so to speak, for codec research and testing, and for "backup" of my collection. That I use it as my primary listening format is mostly incidental. :)

And you've got immpecable taste for quality audio hardware. I don't have any kind of decent "component home theater" system right now, ironically. Just Sony and Bose at the moment. Good, but not as good as I'd like.

Instead I use my PC (Winamp --> reference FLAC decoder --> WaveOut SSRC), an Echo Indigo sound card (with TerraTec Phase28-level sound quality), and powered-Klipsch speakers (or Sennheiser HD-590's) as my main "home" system. I plug my A/V-Out into my TV for video, and my notebook PC becomes the center of my entertainment system. Downside is when I leave town, my g/f is left with a CD boombox and TV-speaker sound. :(