# Burning a .WAV for playback on a CD Player



## bobbyt2012 (Mar 30, 2009)

I have been commissioned to edit and return a show track for my high school's show choir. I have pieced together the tracks and I have edited it with Sony Sound Forge 9. I have saved it as a .wav because of the good sound quality. For some reason, I can't seem to get it to burn to a CD-R very easily. I am using windows Vista, but XP doesn't seem to want to do it either. Once I drag the file onto the disk, it either can't format it and gives up, or it tries to have Windows Media Player burn it(WMP can't even read .wav). I tried burning 2 copies (mp3 and .wav), but I couldn't get them to work on the disk player at the school. The director is using a Superscope PSD340(I think). Can anyone help. (The guy that my school district hired doesn't seem to want to help me and doesn't really care much.) Thanks in advance.


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## Footer (Mar 30, 2009)

iTunes will play and burn wav files. I thought WMC would do the same.


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## bobbyt2012 (Mar 30, 2009)

Footer said:


> iTunes will play and burn wav files. I thought WMC would do the same.



As much as I dislike Apple, I'm going to have to admit defeat on the audio editing spectrum. Thanks. By the way, do you know of any other good utilities that burn audio files?

Also, Windows asks me whether I would like to burn as a "Live File System" or a "Mastered" disc. I didn't think you could use "Live File System" for a CD-R.


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## Footer (Mar 30, 2009)

Mastered. You want to make sure you "finalize" the CD otherwise it will not play in most CD players. Nero and roxio are the "old standards". However, there are probably over a 1,000 free apps out there that will do this.


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## bobbyt2012 (Mar 30, 2009)

Footer said:


> Mastered. You want to make sure you "finalize" the CD otherwise it will not play in most CD players. Nero and roxio are the "old standards". However, there are probably over a 1,000 free apps out there that will do this.



Yeah, I've seen a lot of "free apps" on google and such, but I'm concerned that the majority of them could be malware. Hopefully Windows 7 will add better comprehensive disc formatting support. It never finalized.


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## Footer (Mar 30, 2009)

I have never had an issue with this since windows 98, might be a hardware thing.


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## Van (Mar 30, 2009)

bobbyt2012 said:


> Yeah, I've seen a lot of "free apps" on google and such, but I'm concerned that the majority of them could be malware. Hopefully Windows 7 will add better comprehensive disc formatting support. It never finalized.


 
Will the CD player you are going to play this on support .wav decoding? Many do not. My WMP ver11 supports wav ripping and burning. I tend, however to do most of my CD compiling using Winamp Pro, honestly the free version is almost exactly as good. At home I mostly use Nero or nero express.


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## Van (Mar 30, 2009)

Footer said:


> I have never had an issue with this since windows 98, might be a hardware thing.


Me neither and I agree. 


*arn you put out one, *ONE* bad OS and all of sudden everybody starts dissing. Come on people, let's here it for OS9 ? Nobody is singing it's praises are they ? Ha ! They had to give it away for free and still nobody wanted it!


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## achstechdirector (Mar 30, 2009)

I use wavepad to edit most of my stuff and when you save it you can covert it to different formats, I don't know about Sound Forge 9. I've had the same problem with burning .wav files, too. So I would get a software off the internet to convert it.


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## Footer (Mar 30, 2009)

Van said:


> *arn you put out one, *ONE* bad OS and all of sudden everybody starts dissing. Come on people, let's here it for OS9 ? Nobody is singing it's praises are they ? Ha ! They had to give it away for free and still nobody wanted it!



I have run 3.1, 95, 98, 2k, XP, Vista, and now Windows 7 and have never really had an issue like that. Now, I was not burning CD's with 3.1, but none the less. 

to the OP: 
Its not your OS, its your hardware.


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## Chris15 (Mar 31, 2009)

From memory, WMP does not support high bit rate Wav files. If it can't decode it, it can't burn it. Try exporting the wav at a lower bit resolution and see if it then burns properly...


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## spiwak2005 (Mar 31, 2009)

What sample rate settings did you save the .wav as? Is it 48K? It needs to be 44.1 to burn as audio CD. Doubt that's your problem but I figured I'd mention it.


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## dafunkmonster (Apr 10, 2009)

When I run into problems with burned discs not playing in cd players, the most common one is the disc type. CD-RW's almost never work on players older than a few years. Plain old CD-R's are the best way to go, no fancy colors or anything, and stay away from mixed-media burns. Mixing ISO data with CD audio tends to piss off lots of cd players. If you have the option of doing a simulation and determining the max write speed, do that as well.


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## FMEng (Apr 10, 2009)

Make sure the files you want to burn are 16 bit, 44.1 kHz sampling rate, stereo. If not, use your editing software to convert them to that format. Do not use MP3.

Make sure you are burning the disc in CD-audio format, not data format. Make sure the disc is finalized when completed. If those things are not done, most CD players will not play them.


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## NickJones (Apr 10, 2009)

bobbyt2012 said:


> Hopefully Windows 7 will add better comprehensive disc formatting support. It never finalised.


I beta tested 7 over Christmas, the burning support is average, you can burn ISOs which is a plus, but it is still so focused on "looking pretty" that on older computers everything lags. And the worst part is the "prettyfull" GUI stuff can't be turned off. I see no major problems with XP Pro.

Now as for burning the CD.
1. Save it as a WAV and drag the exported file into iTunes.
2. iTunes will convert it to a iTunes format, once this is done,
3. In iTunes click create new playlist and add the songs in the order in which you want them on the CD.
4. Insert a blank CD
5. Right click on the playlist and chose "Burn to CD" or something along those lines.

Hope this cleared things up
Nick


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