Audio Systems: dvd player, music cd recorder, easy cd creator

Question
I asked the same question to the makers of my dvd player and they sent me this response:

Dear Customer,
Pls make sure that this disk is finalized or "made compatible" to play in
other units, such as our player.

I use either windows xp's drag and click method or windows media player to rip and burn but never saw anything about how to 'finalize' the disk. Do you know what they're talking about or how to do this? Thanks



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Followup To
Question -
Not sure if you can answer this topic but thought I'd try. I have a CD (CD-R) that someone gave me with a bunch of mp3 music files on it. It plays fine on my computer through windows media player. I recently bought a dvd player that is supposed to play several types of media, including mp3's. It even has the mp3 logo on the front of the player. Yet when I put in the CD it won't play anything and I don't know why; thought you may. Thanks.
Answer -
Dear J,

Even tho' MP3 is supposed to be standard, in my experience this applies only to PC media players. Stand-alone CD and DVD players are another matter, regardless of the claim that they can play MP3 files.

For instance, I ripped Joe Jackson's "Seven Rainy Nights" from his web site on to a garden variety CDR and the damn thing plays not only on the DVD player with MP3 capability, but every CD player I have--even ones without MP3 ratings. However, my son sent me a Korn CD he'd ripped from the original to his computer to a CDR, and it won't play on anything. Both contain nothing but MP3 files.

Right now there's such inconsistency in how the MP3 standard is executed, IMHO, compatibility is a hit-or-miss proposition. I don't know of an easy solution to your dilemma.

Good luck. And thanks for choosing allexperts.com!

Kindest regards,

Kevin

Answer
Dear J,

Ah, the light bulb goes on.

Every CD ripper I use (both a Phillips CDR-770 dedicated music CD recorder and the Roxio Easy CD Creator 5 on my PC) goes through a "finalizing" stage. If you use XP to drag and drop MP3 files, they're treated as computer files, because they've been created essentially in that fashion. To actually "rip" a CD you need "ripper" software. Simply dragging and dropping MP3 files via XP (and I guess Windows Media Player--tho' I've never tried it) just creates a data disc with MP3 files on it. You put a data disc into a CD or DVD player and there's nothing in the disc's boot sector to tell the player that there's MP3 files there to play. I think (thinner ice time) that's what "finalizing" does: it drops code into the boot sector (or perhaps the FAT table) that tells any maching other than a PC that it has compatible music files for the machine to play. I used the Roxio software to create the Joe Jackson disc I told you about.

You might want to try using CD ripper software. I use Roxio (www.roxio.com) because it was bundled with my Dell PC. I'm sure there are others out there, but that's a question for some other expert.

None of this explains why my son's pirated Korn CD won't play! That's okay. Korn's sorta second rank in my world.

Kindest regards,

Kevin