Music CD Burning Issues with Win 7 64-bit

Up until a month ago, I had no problems both ripping and burning music CDs to either my laptop with Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit) or my office Windows 7 Professional Std. (also 64-bit).

However, recently I have found that, after burning a CD-R on either machine, only select players will play back the CDs now. My home deck, and a budget SONY portable radio w/CD player & tape deck both won't play ANYTHING I burn on either machine. However, CDs that I've burned prior to a month ago, and up to 8 years ago, DO still work in both players. It's only recently that I'm experiencing this.

I've had my brother use his IT experience to fully optimize both machines, made sure all patches, and both software & firmware updates were applied, but the issue still exists. Ran deep, boot-time virus/malware scans - all clean. Installed a 3rd-party burning software to see if bypassing Media Player would work - nada! Even tried slowing the burn speed to the lowest setting Windows 7 will allow. Still no luck. And yes, I have tried using different brands of blank CD-Rs to see if it's a particular manufacturer. ANY CD-R media I try to burn, it doesn't work.

The ONLY way I can get a CD-R to burn and play in ALL players flawlessly, was to copy the music files (MP3s) to my old Acer Netbook that still has Windows XP on it, and burn at its slowest rate (10x). THEN the CD works. I burn off of my Win 7 machines, and it's hit-or-miss on what players it will work on!

Don't know if this is relevant or not, but when I burn a 73 min CD on the Windows 7 machines, I only see burn discoloration on HALF of the surface of the CD-R. If I burn the same playlist (73 mins) on the XP machine, the WHOLE DISC has discoloration (of being burned).

ANYONE experiencing this, or HAS experienced this with a Win 7-64bit machine and found a solution? PLEASE HELP!!

~ Mark G.
New York, USA

I don't know if it's the burner in both drives or not. It would seem unlikely. It sounds like a codec issue or something along those lines. That's all I got. I really have no clue what the deal is other than a codec issue, driver issue, or it's both CD burners that by chance crapped out at the same time.

I know that depending on the method used to burn CDs it wil only play in certain players. Which leads me to believe it's a software issue of some sorts.

You could try running Autoruns and look under the Codecs tab and see what you have there. But I don't really know if you should have or not have certain codecs. I could compare them to mine and post what the differences are. You can go in Autoruns under file and save the ARN file. Zip the file and upload here.


Autoruns for Windows - Windows Sysinternals | Microsoft Docs

You know what, in Autoruns go above to options | Scan options and check off Verify code signatures.