Is there a difference in the way that those two apps burn CD’s? I got a “new” car a few months ago after a crash, and all the CD’s I burn in iTunes seem to have trouble playing while all the older burned CD’s work fine, and I’m thinking I had probably done most of them on WMP. It’s a 2003 Honda BTW and my daughter also has a 2003 Honda with the same problem. I’m thinking about replacing it with an aftermarket receiver/player.
Can you spread this out further to include more players? e.g. do both iTunes and WMP -burned CDs play on all the CD and DVD players in your house? What if you went next door to your neighbours and tried their car stereos and home DVD players? A larger sample might help you narrow down the possibilities. A newer platform like iTunes may very well not be using the best codex to burn music CDs (since their intention is to do away with CDs), or it could just be a problem with the particular brand/model of CD players Honda is using in their cars.
djm
You can change the settings inside itunes to specify which compression algorithm (.mp3, .m4a, etc.) you want itunes to use when it rips a CD. My guess is that your old itunes-made cds used a format that your car stereo dislikes.
When it comes to burning CDs, the application has very little to do with the quality of the output. The burner and the CDs are the only factors of quality here. The application will change what data is burned to a CD, but all applications, given an identical set of data, burn data equally.
Things to check: make sure you’re burning an audio CD, not an MP3 CD. If your car audio player does support MP3 CDs, then go ahead and make an MP3 CD if you like, though I have noticed that many players will have trouble with an MP3 CD when they can play regular audio CDs just fine. I suspect this has something to do with an audio CD having the data for a single track spread out over a much greater area and minor defects in the disc or jostles when reading are easier to compensate for, whereas an MP3 CD will have the entire track compressed into a much smaller region of the disc, so a scratch, for example, could wipe out much more data than it would otherwise.
When it comes to burning an audio CD, though, there’s only really one way to put that data on a disc, and it all comes down to the burner itself. Either the lands and pits form the digitized waveform of the track or it doesn’t… no real variation.
Wow, it never occurred to me that iTunes could burn CDs, handy tip if I need that facility. These days the only use I have for CDs is to rip the tracks into iTunes and then get rid of them.
When I next buy a car stereo it’s going to have an auxiliary input so I can plug my iPod straight in. I don’t understand why they haven’t all been made this way for years, it would save having to carry any CDs with you in the car.