For some reason, mp3s burned as data on CD do not always "take."

I can play say 14 mp3s, then it may skip to number 30.

At first I thought my CD-RW had gone bad, but it also happened on a brand new CD-RW.

Bummer since wav files take up so much more room. :-(

How old are these discs? Is there a chance they are suffering from disc rot?

Also, have you tried cleaning them?

Second disk was brand new.

I burned 60 Mb of mp3s as wav files and it left only 20 minutes of space on a 700 Mb CD-RW.

No big deal as CDs are pretty cheap.

Drat.

I've gotten packages of writable disks that included bad blanks, but the bad blanks always refused to burn--as cheap as they've become, it happens and I don't get worked up about it if two or three discs out of several hundred don't work and play well with others. I've not encountered one that burned and then refused to be read.

I'm out of ideas.

Quality of media is a factor, but also it could be the filename of the mp3 in question. Some players have problems with the format, if there are any special characters in the filename, or if it is other than standard ASCII encoding, and of course another possibility is the file might not conform to the MPEG1 LayerIII specifications fully, which could cause playback errors or the player will just outright skip it.

I think it is most likely though quality of the media and maybe filenames. When it comes to recordable optical media (from CD to Bluray) I have perfect results with Verbatim discs. And yes I use IMGBurn (under wine) - because I swear by it, plus IMGBurn identifies your media - meaning just because you buy a disc labeled as 'Sony' or 'TDK' - the discID will actually tell you if it is indeed that , or if it is something from a third party like CMC_Magnetics or other company that slaps the brand name on the discs, and makes shoddy media.

I don't know if any actual Linux burning tools that ID the media , but IMGBurn does , again its a windows program, but that is one I myself REFUSE to do without. Try it, and yes also try to get proper media. For CD-RS either Verbatim or Taiyo Yuden is another you could look into.

I haven't burned CD-Rs in years, and I no longer bother with DVDs , just Blurays now, single double and triple layered discs (Verbatim of course).

You may be on to something about the filenames.

A lot of songs have non-alphabetic characters. like dashes, underscores, &

I will rename them and see what happens.

Basically, "the 'CD' format did not anticipate compressed files, such as MP3s." Therefore, when engineers scrambled to produce disk-players (and disks) that mimic'd what player-devices were doing, "certain cerebral overlaps occurred" as the various engineering teams out-guessed each other.

As far as I know, "they all bet on MS-DOS" as a good, least-common denominator. Therefore, use simple (ASCII!) file and folder names, and keep them short.

If you encounter a playback-failure "in the field," the odds are actually pretty good that the root cause of the problem is the data ... not the disk.

what device fails to play the burned cds?
a car stereo, or the same computer/drive it was burned on, or...?

in addition to filenames, also the source of the mp3s is important. if you haven't encoded them yourself, there's many differences, and some may not work on all devices (i keep having problems with my android phone).

Dashes and underscores should be fine, but yes characters like & or !@#$%^* should not be used, although parenthesis ( ) should be fine. I would also assume that it would just have basic ID3 support, so anything that has ID3v2 might also cause a problem.

--edit

I also forgot to add - perhaps casing could be an issue, and also some players will sort the filenames by casing and or alphabetical order. If you want the player only to play it in a specific order, perhaps add numeric values at the beginning of your filenames:

Notice I put a 0 before the numbers, because if you just put in 1 2 3 it might go from file 1 to file 10 instead.

--edit2

Yea and another thing about filenames, depending on the player in question it might only support DOS filename lengths , 8 characters + 3 . So yea also check the documentation of the player in question. Also when burning the disc, you might have to burn in ISO9660 only, do not use JOLIET although using MODE1 or MODE2 for the CD should not matter at all.

You were right about the file names.

I burned 30 mp3s that had only alphabetic names and they all played.

I bought 25 CDs rececently and they happened to be Verbatim. :-)

It's too bad that mp3s do not display their file name when playing.

[QUOTE=Jeebizz;5594081
I think it is most likely though quality of the media and maybe filenames. When it comes to recordable optical media (from CD to Bluray) I have perfect results with Verbatim discs. And yes I use IMGBurn (under wine) - because I swear by it, plus IMGBurn identifies your media - meaning just because you buy a disc labeled as 'Sony' or 'TDK' - the discID will actually tell you if it is indeed that , or if it is something from a third party like CMC_Magnetics or other company that slaps the brand name on the discs, and makes shoddy media.
[/QUOTE]

I can not find diskID in IMgburn ??

Unless this is it.(Verbatim CD)

MS-DOS compatibility is a guaranteed winner, but on CDs ever since 1995, the Joliet FileSystem (allowing 64 characters within certain rules) applies.

Yes, but 11 characters is not enuf to include artist and song title in the filename.

That is it, but I am confused why it says 'Mitsubishi Chemical Corp , but I guess that should be fine. As long as you don't get anything like CMC_Magnetics or some other unknown third party you should be fine.

that's what id tags are for.