I have taken some old audio off a compact cassette from a church service as my mother in law would like it on a CD. I have recorded them on to my hard drive, used Audacity to top and tail, put a bit of EQ on etc, turned them into 44.1k .wavs and then used sox to turn the files into stereo .wavs (as I am lead to believe you can't have mono CD .wavs - don't know if this is really true).

So, I have ended up with seven .wavs, gone into k3b, chosen new audio CD project and just dragged the files into the box at the bottom. However, even though it says it's burned the CD, when you put it in a CD player it doesn't play. Stick the CD in the computer and it [the PC] says it's an empty disk. You can see, by looking at the disk, that k3b has definitely burned something on to the CD. k3b thinks it's a modifiable disk.

I've tried this five different ways now and every time I get a placemat! Anyone seen this and have any idea what I might be doing wrong?

Many thanks.

Usually, if I have problems burning a CD, burning at a lower speed solves the problem. Try burning at the lowest possible speed, it should work.

Mono .wav's are no problem, comes in 2 channels
from the cd's I made.

Modifying files from audacity is a bigger problem,
many things can happen.

Try with the mono files, or record again with
audacity set up to 2-channel, if you want it
that way.
...

Thanks chaps, I did try recording with Audacity as well, but on one machine the sound quality is dreadful - lots of pops and clicks. Sounds like a badly kept piece of vinyl. On another machine it crashes every ten seconds while recording and on a third there's a horrible mains buzz. Audacity looks potentially like a good bit of kit and it might be that PC on board A/Ds are just utter s**t, but so far am not over impressed with it in its current state.

I've given up, will take it to a friend's recording studio and do it on his Mac.