Tech: 49 tracks on a CD, only 20 play-ideas???

Subject: Tech: 49 tracks on a CD, only 20 play-ideas???
From: Mr Red
Date: 19 Nov 13 - 05:09 AM

I made a CD for the contributor (of a new website) with 49 of his tracks, the maximum I could get on the Audio CD. He tells me it only plays the first 20.
Is this a function of an older CD player?
Or is it more general?
I only play them on my PC which has no problem.

the tracks (and more) are also published at stories.stroudfm.co.uk and tech issues there are discussed on this thread

Any ideas welcome

Mr Red

Subject: RE: Tech: 49 tracks on a CD, only 20 play-ideas???
From: Arthur_itus
Date: 19 Nov 13 - 05:48 AM

I would imagine and I am no expert, that you filled up the Cd with the first 20, even though it may have looked as though it did 49. Most Cd's will only take about 20 songs, depending on how long each one is.

Subject: RE: Tech: 49 tracks on a CD, only 20 play-ideas???
From: GUEST
Date: 19 Nov 13 - 06:54 AM

CDs have a capacity of 80 minutes storage time/space, tops. A person would be foolish to expect more than 77 minutes from it due to the nature of how the data is stored. FWIW.

Subject: RE: Tech: 49 tracks on a CD, only 20 play-ideas???
From: GUEST
Date: 19 Nov 13 - 06:56 AM

PS That includes spaces of 'dead air' between songs.

Subject: RE: Tech: 49 tracks on a CD, only 20 play-ideas???
From: GUEST,Ed
Date: 19 Nov 13 - 12:03 PM

According to this page (cdburnerxp.se/help/Audio/compileaudio):

"you can add at maximum 99 tracks to an audio disc. This is a limitation of the audio CD specification."

Subject: RE: Tech: 49 tracks on a CD, only 20 play-ideas???
From: Mr Red
Date: 19 Nov 13 - 12:18 PM

Perhaps I should explain my pedegree. Electronic Engineer 40 plus years standing. This is no rookie mistake, this is a gap in my knowledge of ALL CD players, and their historical capacity. Truth to tell I have never owned one, never bought myself a CD until I needed wedding music for videos of same. Always played CD's on a PC. As I say, PC has no problem playing CD's with 49 tracks. Or burning same in Nero. The limit came in at 640Mb - all tracks 1 minute ish - I didn't even exceed capacity limit in order to be as compatible as I knew, never thought of track limit - probably assumed 99 was a natural limit for a system that can cope with double digits.

So are there CD players that cannot cope with 20+ tracks? Legacy designs maybe. It is data I lack, not nouse.

Subject: RE: Tech: 49 tracks on a CD, only 20 play-ideas???
From: Jack Campin
Date: 19 Nov 13 - 01:46 PM

Did the burner finalize the CD properly? If not, the tracks may be there, but not indexed in a way that a standard CD player can access.

CDR is not the same format as CD, and many players that can handle any CD fail on CDR. This seems particularly common with DVD players.

I've never used Nero, but since it's Windows software I suspect it smells of poo.

This commercial CD (89 tracks) plays on every CD player I've tried.

Fischer: Blumen-Strauss

Subject: RE: Tech: 49 tracks on a CD, only 20 play-ideas???
From: GUEST,Guest
Date: 19 Nov 13 - 01:54 PM

What format were the tracks you supposedly loaded?

Subject: RE: Tech: 49 tracks on a CD, only 20 play-ideas???
From: andrew e
Date: 19 Nov 13 - 02:07 PM

Try using a different make of CD.

The CD player in my car will only work with some makes, even though they play on the computer fine.

Could also be the contributor's CD player.
Did they try making another from their computer with a make of CD which normally works for them?

Subject: RE: Tech: 49 tracks on a CD, only 20 play-ideas???
From: GUEST,Ed
Date: 19 Nov 13 - 02:32 PM

It is data I lack, not nouse.

Try Google then...

You also lack the ability to punctuate correctly (there is no apostrophe in CDs). You're not particularly great on the politeness front, either. A please or a thank you doesn't go amiss.

Subject: RE: Tech: 49 tracks on a CD, only 20 play-ideas???
From: Reinhard
Date: 19 Nov 13 - 03:01 PM

I have a CD "Yehudi Menuhin explains the instruments of the orchestra" with 98 tracks. Ir was made in 1988, played fine on my then CD player, and still does play fine on current CD players. So 49 tracks on your CD shouldn't be a technical limit.

Subject: RE: Tech: 49 tracks on a CD, only 20 play-ideas???
From: GUEST
Date: 19 Nov 13 - 03:13 PM

Once more, how much time do the 49 tracks take?

Subject: RE: Tech: 49 tracks on a CD, only 20 play-ideas???
From: Newport Boy
Date: 19 Nov 13 - 05:52 PM

I have a memory of a CD player that could only play a limited number of tracks, but that was 25 years ago and I can't recall any details. I've not encountered the problem since, and I doubt that there are many 20-year-old players still working.

Have you asked the contributor what the player reports when it reads the TOC from the CD. It should give number of tracks and total playing time. Your 49 tracks seem to be well within the CD limits.

I haven't used Nero for a few years, but I never had a problem with it.

Phil

Subject: RE: Tech: 49 tracks on a CD, only 20 play-ideas???
From: breezy
Date: 19 Nov 13 - 06:34 PM

no idea mate, you are more qualified than most, why not ask the manufacturer.

I love you in blue
I love you in red
but most of all
I love you

Subject: RE: Tech: 49 tracks on a CD, only 20 play-ideas???
From: Jack Campin
Date: 19 Nov 13 - 08:56 PM

Two more possibilities:

- a defect in the CD. CD players are more fussy about those than computers are, and may just stop when they hit one. Fix: try another CD, preferably a different make.

- a burner with insufficient power. The disk moves faster as you get towards the edge, so if the power is marginal, the burn pattern may just get too faint for some players to read before the end is reached. Fix: reduce the overspeed factor (right down to 1x for starters) and see if that gives the laser enough time to burn properly.

If you have iTunes, try burning with that. It has less options than Nero, so you are less likely to accidentally create a disk in some overambitious and unportable format.

Subject: RE: Tech: 49 tracks on a CD, only 20 play-ideas???
From: GUEST,Woodsie
Date: 20 Nov 13 - 03:34 AM

I definitely remember owning a Portable CD/cassette/radio player that I had in the 90s that could not read more than 20 tracks!

Subject: RE: Tech: 49 tracks on a CD, only 20 play-ideas???
From: Mr Red
Date: 20 Nov 13 - 10:15 AM

Thankyou Woosie. Legacy designs obviously did have arbitrary limits. There ain't no way I can get round that other than limiting the tracks to 20.

Nero says "Make an audio CD that will play on any CD player"
Which don't make it true, but then it don't report a warning on tracks 20+ either. The only problem I have had with many versions of Nero is when I made a mixed mode disk and didn't follow their syntax (Blue Book). It played blank for the equivalent length on a (unspecified) CD player then the tracks. When correctly formulated in Mixed Mode CDs' performances did not reveal any problems. CD's are invariably finalised (UK spelling) and verified as part of Nero's "Burn" operation. The source format was MP3 but Nero will convert it into the CD format that is the minor variation of WAV that the computer world refer to as cda. Quality is no better than MP3 but on voice that is not an issue.

Google requires the right search term and the hope that others have asked this question on a public forum, so far "not found", but a discussion on a 99 limit (as per Red Book) shows the usual conflicting opinions you get in forums (or should that be fora?) that don't look like facts. "Works on my machine" wouldn't help in this context. Wiki is not specific on limits outwith "Red Book".

So should we refer to CD, C.D. or are they Compact Disks? Or are they discs?

Subject: RE: Tech: 49 tracks on a CD, only 20 play-ideas???
From: GUEST,Stim
Date: 20 Nov 13 - 11:33 AM

Seems to me that the first CD player I had could only count up to 20 tracks, and further seem to remember, in the dark distant past, using Toast to turn one commercial CD that had too many tracks to play into two that would. I suddenly realized that I haven't burned a CD in quite a while, and rarely even listen to them anymore.

Subject: RE: Tech: 49 tracks on a CD, only 20 play-ideas???
From: GUEST
Date: 20 Nov 13 - 11:43 AM

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/57222-6-player-track#

Something to try, Red.

Subject: RE: Tech: 49 tracks on a CD, only 20 play-ideas???
From: GUEST,Guest
Date: 20 Nov 13 - 02:40 PM

If your original tracks are MP3 then the burning programme would allow you to seem to burn them as they appear to fall within the size limits of the CD.

In actual fact as indicated above they are converted on burning to the equivalent of WAV tracks which are approximately 10 times bigger.

If you converted the tracks to WMA then the software would probably indicate that you could burn about 200 tracks on a CD but of course you can't.

18 - 20 is the normal maximum.

Subject: RE: Tech: 49 tracks on a CD, only 20 play-ideas???
From: Roger the Skiffler
Date: 21 Nov 13 - 04:03 AM

I've found on at least one commercial CD I have that a couple of the CD players in the house wouldn't play the last track or not all of it while it played OK on others. Which suggests some players have a problem, rather than the disc. I lack Mr Red's technical background so | can't suggest a reason, I would have thought there should be an industry standard all makers of players should follow?

RtS

Subject: RE: Tech: 49 tracks on a CD, only 20 play-ideas???
From: GUEST,Jack Campin
Date: 21 Nov 13 - 04:26 AM

There are standards for CDs (which most manufacturers do follow, there will be a logo on the player to say so) but not for CDRs, which is what Mr Red has produced. All CDR burners can do weird formats that will fool some CD player or other.

CD-RW is very much worse. Most CD players will fail on most CD-RWs.

Subject: RE: Tech: 49 tracks on a CD, only 20 play-ideas???
From: Gurney
Date: 21 Nov 13 - 03:18 PM

I tried to fill CDs with MP3s once using Nero in audio mode, and it didn't work, as in Mr. Red's case. I burned them in data mode and it did work.
I assumed that the players couldn't find them, possibly due to the number of titles. I couldn't detect any deterioration of sound quality by ear. 2Gb of music on two-and-a-bit CDs. MP3-player backup.
The music in my case was all FROM CDs, so was properly arranged FOR CDs, although converted to MP3.