bad quality on playback of cd

[cangal]

I am really hoping that someone can help me out. I have read ????????? posts and haven't found the answer to my problem. I am a newbie to the d/l and burning thing. I have d/l songs with no problems but when I burn certain ones to cd, the quality is terrible. An example of this is Keith Urban's "Making Memories Of Us" (among a few others). When I listen to the song on my puter, it sounds just fine. When I listen to it again after I have burnt it to cd, it is terrible with alot of background noise (sorry hard to describe the background noise). Most of the other music is fine, it is just with particular songs. Could it be that they are fine but something is put onto the file to make it not playback properly when burnt? I have d/l many versions and get the same results. I finally found one that works okay. Like I said, it is only certain songs that do this. Is this maybe a copyright issue? Is there a way to tell which ones will do this?

[nesman]

It may be.

Where do you download these from? Have you tried it straight from original cd? (You don't have to tell me if you own the cd, I'll assume you do, as I own all the cd's tha tI have mp3's of)

What program do you use to burn the cd's with?

[cangal]

Thanx for answering. I will try to answer the questions as best as I can. Firstly, I am using winmx. Secondly, I was using roxio (the free 2x piece of crap one that is with media player nine) After three wasted cds I decided to try something different and downloaded the trial version of nero as I had read about it on this site. After d/l a few versions of the problem songs, I have gotten ones that actually work and sound good on playback of cd... after the 12th song on the audio cd, nero quit and said it was a buffering problem. I am starting to think that maybe it could be my puter/burner. I am running a 600mhz, 128 mg ram, and only a 4x28 cdrw which was just given to me. I am not a techie so I don't know if the speed of my puter could be a problem. I also did notice something else... When I have played some of the songs back in media nine the title, artist, and K bits/second are shown. I notice on a couple of the copies, the K bits/second come up as 494. That does seem rather high as I only see up to 320 written on winmx. The high number makes me a bit suspicious of the file. I could be way off on the mark with this though. My next step could be to just get another computer and see if that fixes it but that would be a rather expensive experiment to find that maybe it could be the songs. I was just wondering if this could be something like the fake files thing only they are corrupted or something in some way. It is only on three particular songs that I have found this happening and on a recurring basis. They are fine when I listen to them in media player but just not once they have been transferred to cd. Oh geez... i hope I didn't confuse the issue even more. Sorry if I did. I am just getting frustrated. It has gotten to the point that I am yelling at my computer and calling it all sorts of not nice names. Thanx again to anyone that even tries.

[Canada Joe]

1. Upgrading to WMP10 would improve the "Roxio" problem (10 is an excellent media center with the WMP9 restrictions removed-mp3 can be set as default rip media, etc)
2. They are not fake files if they play OK on your computer.
3. Unfortunately I think you have already discovered the solution .. upgrade to faster CPU and avoid buffer under-run. Meanwhile try burning at the slowest speed your burner will allow (might help).
4. Many of the inexpensive mp3 download sites (http://ca.music.yahoo.com/) allow play/save to disc/share with friends (yahoo messenger share OK) BUT not burn. This could be part of your problem if you are downloading from users who aren't aware or assume you know.

[cangal]

Thanx for more info. Me thinks that a new puter is gonna have to be it. I am running windows 98 and it is time to upgrade. I did manage to put my music onto a few cds in mp3 format and hopefully it turned out okay. I do get an error but it is with the last song on the cd so no problems with that. I am glad that I don't have to redo everything. Thanx to those who gave info. Oh yeah, been to Red Deer, I got lotsa friends there. Very nice city.