burning need

June 30, 2005 7:00 PM

I seem to be having a weird issue burning MP3s with itunes.

In the past I've created playlists specifically to burn (MP3 format) so that I can clear out some of my harddrive. However, no matter what I do, itunes never seems to want to burn the entire playlist. If I have a list of 135 songs, it'll burn 118 (random) songs.

At first a thought it was a CDR space issue, but even if I add 60 songs, it'ss burm something random like 47. There's nothing in the options or help that I can find to deal with this. Anybody know hat the problem is and how I can fix it?

posted by aclevername to computers & internet (8 comments total)

Do all the items in the playlists have their checkbox checked?
posted by dobbs at 7:12 PM on June 30, 2005

Are all of the files .mp3? Perhaps MP3 CDs burn differently for .m4a and other formats.
posted by themadjuggler at 7:24 PM on June 30, 2005

Yes, but some of them get greyed out once it starts burning (even then, the checkboxes are still checked.
posted by aclevername at 7:25 PM on June 30, 2005

Are you sure you're burning mp3-only files? No 'protected' songs from the iTunes Music Store? Any aac files? Just checking....

Also, if they're all truly mp3s, have you played all of the ones that seem randomly left out?
posted by kimota at 7:31 PM on June 30, 2005

Is there an exclamation point in the left most column? An (!) indicates songs which iTunes knows about but cannot find the corresponding files on disk.
posted by nathan_teske at 8:23 PM on June 30, 2005

no, no protected songs , no exclamation points, all been plyed before. Although now that you mention it, I believe a bunch are aac files from allofmp3.

Never thought of that!
posted by aclevername at 8:51 PM on June 30, 2005

Ah, as themadjuggler sussed out, iTunes can burn an Audio CD, an MP3 CD, or a Data CD (or DVD). I'm not sure why iTunes wouldn't be smart enough to allow on-the-fly conversion of AAC files into MP3s for an MP3 CD when, apparently, it can convert both MP3 and AAC when doing an Audio CD.
posted by kimota at 9:17 PM on June 30, 2005

To clarify: In your burning options, make sure you choose data cd, not MP3 cd. MP3 cd will just skip any files in other formats, data cd will burn everything.
posted by cushie at 3:18 AM on July 1, 2005