Car CD players & K3B burnt CDs

Are they mp3s? I have tried with mp3s and my car doesn't play those. Only .wav or copies of a CD (and the originals of course).

No these were 2 regular CDs dated 2002 & 2006. BTW my car
can play MP3. It's difficult to tell what an audio CD
really looks like because Konqueror seems to "interpret"
and present a view of digested & collated information.
It does this for non-copied CDs also. When I *really*
look at a CD it is full of ".cda" files (that I believe
are really ".wav" files).

Hi Beckwith,
How are you burning the music is it on a cdr or cdrw its possible car player does not recognise cdrws where as home stereo CD player, a home DVD player, and PC do. Trying burning on cdr disc and finalise disc, dont leave in multisession mode then hopefully it will play in car.

John

Hello
I will have to check what sort of CD it is tonight. But from memory it is a CDR - definitely from TDK. The session was closed, it was burnt using the K3B "clone CD" option.
K3B ignores a request to burn at slower speed (bug) - it was supposed to be 8x, but burned at 24x. I'll check tonight if NERO burned discs are also affected.

Hi Beckwith,
Are the original cds still working in the car player !
John

possibly not more information...
1) originals still play in my car
2) copies do not play in a 2nd car
3) CD from same batch plays in my car
4) CD from different make burnt by Nero plays.
5) Blanks are "TDK 80 CD-R" about 20 into a cylinder of
100.
6) I've used a previous 100 of identical type.
7) I use them for backups! I have restored from at
least 2 (of the previous cylinder of 100).
----------
Now the bad part.
1) The last burnt CD gives "CD ERROR" on all m/cs and
MEPIS says it is blank. Which it isn't. It is burnt
"empty".
2) I just repeated burning yet another: K3B cloner says
"read ~600MB" when I insert the blank and start the
burn, the size increases up to about 750MB, and the
result is an empty "burnt CD".
3) I sent a CD to a friend recently, and he reported 20
empty tracks, from a 12 track original (not pirated)
music!

I'm thinking: "time for a new DVDRW drive" rather than blame K3B. Comments??? Do I buy a new one?

Beckwith,
If your music players in mepis are playing cd correctly then at least you will know music codecs are not missing in mepis.

What might be worth trying is in synaptic remove k3b then try reinstalling k3b in case it somehow got corrupted and on opening reinstalled k3b go to settings at top of k3b and click on k3b setup so it redetects your dvdrw drive and apply.

If this does not work maybe your right you might need a new dvdrw?

John

I tried to edit my previous entry.
It got lost.

I burned a CD of the same stock, but using Nero in M$
@ 8x speed. That worked perfectly (car, stereo, PC etc)
Which means (?) the burner is OK.

I'll reinstall K3B tomorrow night. Family calls. G'night

Hello,
I re-installed K3b 0.12.17 (same version). This almost correctly burned at 8x (it said "burning at 8x") but reported a burn speed between 9.29 & 9.86. The read image size was 551 MB, the burn cycle said 659 MB. But the CD
is at least not burnt blank - it will play in the PC and on a stereo - but not in my car. Note: the CD that I burnt last night using NERO under WinXP does play in my car.
I thought, maybe I should reinstall "cdrecord" - but I notice the version hasn't changed.
So other than the fact it burned slower, I have not really progressed.
Given NERO works... I would not suspect my H/w

Hi Beckwith,
Now you have reinstalled k3b again instead of coping cd have you tried in k3b burning in file,new project,new audio cd project and doing it this way. Or failing that maybe even copying tracks temporary to hard drive then do above but even try new data cd project.
Other than that I am stumped. Hopefully someone else has some ideas for you before you pull all of your hair out with frustration.

John

I gained this info by spending lots of time researching the information at cdfreaks.com and crdfaq.org

I am not an authority on the issues of cd burning, so I stand to be corrected on any of the following, but hopefully you will be better off for having a slightly better understanding and a healthy partial mistrust of writable optical media and the writers.

Every cd or dvd you burn contains errors, there are no exceptions. The drives ability to recognize the blank media (mostly firmware) directly affects its ability to use the correct burn processes to use on that disk reliably. If the disk type is unknown, the drive falls back to a best guess and guess what, branded cd's aren't always what they claim to be.

I have had the same brand and packaging of media (not in the same package, but packaging type) identified as manufactured by 2 totally different companies, one was the original as branded, the other was one of their competitors, but the media looked exactly the same. One stack of 50 disks had 18 rejects! Unacceptable wouldn't you think?

Manufacturing processes and dye formulation all play a part in the big picture. The best you can do is to keep your drives firmware up to date as much as is reasonably possible and of course your burning software too.

The particular version of Nero you are using may just have a greater tolerance for certain types of error correction than cdrecord but the final readability is determined by predominantly one thing, errors per second when measured at 1x read speed. If the number of errors exceeds 22, the media is in simple terms nothing more than a coaster and different drives have different capabilities relating to read ahead optimization and the ability to recover from certain read errors on differing brands of media.

Optical media is split into a sector size of 2048 bytes and the first 96 bytes contains ecc code. Many readers skip the 96 byte header unless they need to access the ecc code because of errors. During the burning process, the laser burns a track, reads it back then writes the 96byte ecc code so readers can recover from any errors in that sector.

By the way, that's how some copy protection is added to commercial media, deliberate errors in the data track and ecc code only readable by css software. When you copy a disk, only the data is copied. When you make a clone copy, the 96 byte track is copied too, but this is not foolproof because the burning software essentially forces the laser to write exactly as it is given, leaving no room for its own ecc code.

The good news is that for PC drives, most can have their firmware updated, (unfortunately though, you will have to use windows tools) the bad news for car cd players and pretty much any set-top player is they can not unless you're a service technician or don't care for the cost of having it done.

Add to all the above a condition known of as disk-rot and accept that all optical media burning is at the best, going to work 98% of the time, but when there are failures, they are generally catastrophic in terms of data loss and the older recorded media gets, the more the likelihood of imminent failure.

Does this help with your burning question? Probably not, but at least you should be by now better off for the sake of understanding but alas no better off for the remedy you seek.

Mike P

--------------------
Life may not be the party we thought, but while we're here, we may as well dance.
Break M$'s shackles from your feet and free yourself with Mepis

I hear what you're saying. But I disagree about the reliability factor. What I have is a situation where K3b
consistently nolonger writes CDs that can be read in my car.
Now obviously this is a minor complaint. But I use K3b to
make backups: I tar up my data, compress it, and burn it
to a CD. Recently I have created several CDs for friends and sent them only to find either a) they contain many
empty tracks, b) the disk is burnt but empty. One was a
data disk of photographs for my parents, my father (an MS
convert) was amused that Linux couldn't create a CD. I find
it impossible to believe that NERO on XP can better K3b on
Linux. This is not an OS issue. The formats and tolerances
of CDs is well documented.
Don't you guys use CDs for backups????

Hi Beckwith,
Still at it then have you tried burning with live cd to test if something has gone wrong with hard disk install maybe try the latest beta live cd. Also try using a different blank cdr see if that does make a difference, years ago I had problems with memorex cdrs I sometimes got good burns and others I just got a load of blank mug coasters now I use datawrite I get no problems.
I burn isos with k3b and copy cds with no problems including data but I must admit I tend to backup on usb sticks and usb external drives more often now than cds and unfortunately I do not use a cd car player. I admire your patience in not giving up.

John

I have to say this:
if program A on hardware B produces a correct result AND
program C on hardware B produces un reliable result
does this not imply program C is dodgy?
"C" being the Mepis/K3b combination.
I have a chance for a DVD DL burner for US$60, I will chance
it and see if that changes anything.

Hello,
I replaced a Lite-On SOHW-1693S with a Pioneer DVR-112D.
Mepis does not recognise the device at all. So I tried
the old M$XP and it did in fact say "new hardware" - then
it too refused to do anything with it. There are only
3 plugs: power, IDE, and analog audio (the Lite-On also
had digital audio). And before anyone asks, the device
is master on IDE2 (disk on 1) - same as the old device.
Unless someone can tell me why I'm missing something so
obvious before 9am tomorrow (I'm eight hours ahead of the UK and 13+ ahead of the US). I'm just taking the new
device back to the supplier with a "it doesn't work!".

Beckwith can you try Lite-On on master ide1 set it to slave temporary, even if it means you taking out a secondary hard drive if you have one in that way if it detects okay in this one you will know that other ide port is faulty.
If still does not detect I would say you are right Lite-On is faulty and will need replacing.

John

Beckwith, also check the ribbon cable. Try swapping the cables between your primary and secondary IDE controllers. If things go bad, then there's a chance the cable itself is funky. But if it/they is/are, they are cheap to replace

Jon

Microsoft Windows Vista now on sale!
Buy now, Really Pay Later

Hello,
The cabling was as it was, i.e. unchanged; save for the
digital output which I ignored. Both drives were set as
masters. Both on 2nd the IDE cable. Both Mepis and M$
seem to "see" the drive, but simply time-out when trying
to access it. Too late to try any of your suggestions,
now 08:10 and I'm at work - off to the vendor in 50mins.

OK
the unit purchased yesterday is a dud. Proved it in an HP
here at work. Supplier has replaced it, and the new one
works in the HP. So tonight we'll what it can burn!
cheers

New Pioneer DVD dual layer burns CDs that will play in my
car. Now I feel happier that burning backups will be as
good as can be (as long as I look after the media).
*but* K3B when told to burn at 10x, did so between 7.7
and 12.9x. Said read image was 375, but write image
was 448. I can live with the last two issues.