Can't Win 7 burn MP3 files to CD?

I tried to burn some MP3 audio files to a CD (having chosen the "for CD player" option), and was told it could not be done, and that I should check the icon next to the file to learn the reason why. But there was no such icon.

Then I converted the MP3 file to a WAV file. It took up much more space (110 KB for the WAV vs. 14 KB for the MP3 file), but at least it worked.

It would be so much easier if I could write MP3 files to a CD without having to first convert all my MP3 files to WAV.

Can this be done?

Thanks for your help.

Peyton

peytontodd said:

I tried to burn some MP3 audio files to a CD (having chosen the "for CD player" option), and was told it could not be done, and that I should check the icon next to the file to learn the reason why. But there was no such icon.

Then I converted the MP3 file to a WAV file. It took up much more space (110 KB for the WAV vs. 14 KB for the MP3 file), but at least it worked.

It would be so much easier if I could write MP3 files to a CD without having to first convert all my MP3 files to WAV.

You SHOULD NOT CONVERT MP3 TO WAV, for any purpose! Actually, MP3 was created from WAV, as a lossy smaller file format that "sounds very much like the original WAV".

WAV is essentially the format used to create true original CD-quality sound, and depending on the "audio quality" vs. file size of your desired conversion from original "holy-grail 100% perfect" CD original sound (i.e. WAV), your encoding parameters to produce lossy MP3 from WAV can produce an MP3 file of varying size. The "best" quality MP3 is about 1/8-1/5 the size of the original WAV, depending on the actual amount of "sound" in the WAV file. You can produce much smaller MP3 files from WAV originals, and they also would sound worse than larger MP3 files. The encoding of WAV-to-MP3 has parameters defining resulting audio sound quality vs. file size.

Remember, MP3 is a lossy format, and is NOT a bit-perfect "duplicate" of the original WAV. By "bit-perfect duplicate" I mean you cannot recreate the original WAV file from an MP3. However FLAC is a lossless format, and IS a 100% bit-perfect "duplicate" of the original WAV, except smaller (actually it is just a better more efficient compression format of the original WAV than WAV, but containing exactly the same data bits).

FLAC is like a better ZIP of the WAV original, and also has an encoding parameter that determines file size (vs. the amount of CPU time required to produce the FLAC file from the WAV file), but today's computers can produce a FLAC from a WAV in just seconds, so you might as well make smaller FLAC files (i.e. higher compression). ALL FLAC FILES ARE BIT-PERFECT, NO MATTER WHAT THEIR FILE SIZE!! You can ALWAYS RECREATE THE ORIGINAL WAV FROM A FLAC, NO MATTER WHAT COMPRESSION WAS USED TO PRODUCE THE FLAC. FLAC files with "compression 6" (with compression 8 being the absolute smallest) are about 1/4-40% the size of the original WAV. So if you wanted to recreate the original WAV files from the smaller bit-perfect FLAC copies you could and then you could create an audio CD of those WAV files and you'd genuinely truly have back the real original CD from which the FLAC files were ripped in the first place.

Anyway, I use IMGBURN for many years as my free "burner" software. It can copy data to CD/DVD (including copying MP3 files or anything else). It can also create true audio CD's from WAV files. Remember that an audio CD actually" plays when you insert it into a "player" (i.e. CD/DVD optical drive on your computer, or mechanical CD player in your car or home entertainment system, etc.), and potentially has information about album/artist/track written to the optical disc so that it can be displayed on a screen of the car or player, etc. That's why creating a self-playing audio CD is different than just copying data onto an optical disc (which is simply like writing files to a USB flash drive). IMGBURN can do it all.

The only issue with IMGBURN is that its installer file currently has OpenCandy included, which needs to be opted out of when you run the install. This is really unfortunate, but your anti-virus anti-malware will automatically strip it out as well when you run the installer. Nevertheless once you actually get it installed it is a terrific product, and can handle all types of optical discs, to/from ISO for data files, create audio CD, etc.

Anyway, there is no point in going backwards from MP3 to WAV from an audio quality point of view, as the MP3 is already lossy and not the original WAV. Your converted WAV-from-MP3 is only much larger than the original MP3, but is not the original WAV. Playing this WAV file will sound just like the MP3, not the original WAV from which the MP3 was ripped. Your only objective was to copy your MP3 files to CD, and for that any "burner" software can be used, such as IMGBURN or others.

Thanks so much, guys, for all your replies, and special thanks to dsperber for the long explanation. (Also, my apologies for taking so long to get back to you.) I tried the process first with ImgBurn, which I can see is a very sophisticated app, but it never presented me with the option that Win 7 does as to which kind of CD I want (for a CD player vs. like an regular disc drive). So I just went with what I was offered, and it turned out to be the latter. Does ImgBurn not write regular audio CDs? It does at least skip to the next song on the resulting CD as a playlist should but you have to start it by double-clicking the first song when viewing the list on the computer. If I put it into a standard CD player, it reads it, then reports "no Disc". Also, unless I'm missing something, you have to exit and re-open ImgBurn to get back to its main menu. Sorry for all the knocks against a sophisticated app that this obviously is.

Next I tried BurnAwareFree, which worked fine. It does have a separate choice for Burn an Audio CD, and when I chose that, it burned a CD that the standard CD player recognized and played perfectly, skipping to each next song just as it should. The same CD built by BurnAwareFree plays in Win10, skipping to each next song appropriately, but not in Win 7 unless you double-click the first song, in which case it does skip to each next song after that.

Is CUE the name of some app I should use for this instead of ImgBurn? Or is it a file type? (I notice that when I do an image copy, the image copy results in a BIN file and a CUE file, and I point at the CUE file in order to copy the image back to another CD.) If so, how exactly would that work? It sounds like it would involve a two-step process.

Yes, I notice that the files on an audio disk have a .cda file extension. But with BurnAwareFree I can start with mp3 files and write them to .cda's in a single step.