Burning music in Audio format to a CD-R CD Using Window Media Player

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I am using Windows Media Player under Windows 7 Professional to burn an MP3 file in Audio format to a CD-R cd. I am unable to get it to work and furthermore, I am unable to determine the problem. Here is what I do.

1) Start Windows Media Player.
2) Click on the Burn tab in WMP.
3) Select Audio CD from the drop-down on the Burn tab
4) Locate the MP3 file on my C drive and drag it to the Burn List area in WMP.
5) Click on Start Burn
6) When the message is displayed to insert a CD, I do so.

My results
a) The CD player/burner clicks repeatedly about every 10 seconds or so.
b) No messages of any kind appear, i.e. no message indicating an error or problem of any kind. No message of successful completion or even progress.
c) There is what appears to be a a progress bar on the Burn tab but after I click on Start Burn, this bar never shows any progress. None at all.
d) The same result occurs if I put the CD in the drive before clicking on Start Burn.

Other Facts
1) Windows 7 Professional, 64-bit, 4 Gb RAM.
2) Don’t know the version of WMP, can’t find an “About” tab for that application anywhere.
3) I have not attempted to burn to this drive using any other applications.
4) This drive is also the CD/DVD player and I have successfully played CDs and DVDs multiple times.
5) Using Device Manager I verified that the drivers for the CD drive are current.
6) There are no error messages of any kind anywhere that I can see or find, yet the burn does not work.
7) When I attempt to right-click to choose properties for the drive, it does its repeated clicking for several minutes then stops. Properties never comes up.
8) It looks like a hardware problem with the drive to me, but using Troubleshooting under Control Panel results in no errors.
9) Unless error messages are being written to some hidden file or log, I have absolutely no error messages at all, not even time-out messages.

Anyone know what the problem might be or where I can look?

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It does sound hardware related.

Can you play CDs & DVDs now?
Have you tried using another blank CD?
Sorry for this one but are you sure the blank CD has been inserted the correct way? (I have seen some blank CDs where it is very hard to distinguish what the writeable side is!)

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Certainly does sound like a hardware issue. Consider trying a different app to burn your CD. If it works, you can probably rule out hardware. Ashampoo Burning Studio 6 is free and works fine on Win 7 64-bit for me, if you don’t have a different burning app to try.

Good luck!
John

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You don’t mention if anything related to this is writen to the event viewer.
Type “eventvwr.msc” in the search or run bos, without the quotes.

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Thanks to CLiNT I looked at the Event viewer and found this
The device, DeviceCdRom0, has a bad block.

I wasn’t aware of the event viewer until now but now that I am, there is a lot of information there. Can you offer any help on how to interpret it? The “bad block” message was in the Administrative Events section and the source was “cdrom”. So there are several things that are not completely clear to me.

1) A “bad block” to me implies a block on the CD. Okay, but the message says the “device” has a bad block. So, IS there a problem with the hardware device or not?

2) It isn’t clear if this event is from trying to read a cd or from the burner trying to burn. My problem is with the burner, but I was reading DVD’s and CD’s to test if they work (they do).

3) So assuming this verifies that my burner has a problem, do I take this message to my maintenance people?

I was hoping to see some event from Windows Media Player, since that is the app that I am using, but I don’t see any reference to that anywhere in the Event viewer.

So I plan to do some more controlled experiements and then check the event viewer again.

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I did another test of the CD Burner, using a brand new CD-R disk and Windows Media Player. So it did its usual clicking and failed to actually write anything. I had to cancel the task and reboot to remove the disk (a common effect with this problem).

So once I rebooted, I started Windows Event Viewer and I still didn’t see any entries for today related to the CDrom in the Administrative Events area like I noted above (that entry was from July 31st). I did some more browsing around Event Viewer and found a Hardware Events log in the Applications and Services logs area. The Hardware Events log was and still is completely empty. So I am still pretty sure this is a hardware problem, but Windows Events viewer isn’t giving me any clear confirmation of that. But given that my experience with Windows Events viewer is so limited, I can’t be completely sure.

Anyone have any thoughts on this problem given my recent reports?

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A couple of thoughts … Be sure to have backups and restore points….
1) Have you tried a different burning program?
2) Use device manager to delete the CD/DVD drive and then reboot Windows to re-install the drivers.
3) Remove the upper filter and lower filter values from the Registry.

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Try another ripping and bUrning program as suggested earlier. If you are successful you will know the error has something to do with Mediaplayer.

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Another thought is try a different brand of CD-R. Even newer drives still seem to be more compatable with one brand of CD/DVD over another. However, I agree, from what I’m reading its hardware. Clicking noises almost always seem to indicate failure, or that it will fail soon.

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