Burning mp3's to CD (yet again!)

[Binoculars]

Deleted my previous post by mistake, so I'll start again.

The original post asked about whether my daughter's newly purchased Sony D-EJ621 Discman did actually play MP3's, as two separate reviews claimed (although the instruction manual says nothing about it.)

I found a previously recorded CD full of mp3's and tried it. The player didn't want anything to do with it and said "no disc", then I noticed it was on a CD-RW, so in the interests of eliminating another possibility regardless of any technical logic, I copied the disc on to a CD-R. This time the Discman seemed perfectly happy, read the data and the display indicated it was started playing track 1, with just the slight problem that there was no sound.

Does this mean anything to anyone?

[All Systems Go]

Lots of things to take into account here. First of all was the volume turned up? Then at what bit rate were the files encoded at? Are the files MP3s or WMAs or ATRAC type files? You might want to try making an MP3 CD from scratch, without copying it from an RW, as there can be stuff lost in the copying from a CD RW to a CD R. Daft question but do the head phones work?

[RadarContact]

I just checked the Sony homepage and it doesn't say anything about mp3's there. And I guess they would mention this, wouldn't they? ;)

The discman finding and playing track 1 is normal, since the data on a CD-R is stored in one single track. Check how long the discman shows this track to be...

You'll have to convert your mp3's to CDDA before (or while) burning them. Note that this will increase filesize to about ten times, you might get CD-R80's (80mins of music) working on the Discman, however. Most burning software will do the conversion for you.

[MasterGreen]

OK - I have a useful input. Roars of disbelief from crowd ....

Most MP3 players will only take a limited or singular MP3 format. This is certainly the case with my little monster.

It only likes :

Layer 3 : 44100 Mhz : Stereo : 128 kbps

MG

[Binoculars]

Daughter has since departed for foreign shores accompanied by Discman. No matter what I tried, I couldn't make it play mp3's so come to the conclusion that two reviews for whatever reason were completely in error. Having spoken to her after the first leg of her trip, a 15 hour bus trip during which she said it was going more or less constantly, it seems the glowing reports of battery life in said Sony are on the mark.

Thank you to the respondents.

[Lurk R]

I think Radar Contact is on the right track. MP3 is just a compressed file format - it takes the standard CDDA type file (which CD players expect) and compresses it to around 10%. When the MP3 files were burned onto the CD was the format also converted? Using a standard CD player to read an MP3 file is like trying to use Microsoft Word to open an Excel spreadsheet! There a chance that the MP3's have just been stored on your CD in the manner you would store backup data from the computer.