Ok, help an old guy out? CD playback issue.

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dsertdog56

New member
As you can guess I'm a new guy. I've been playing for a long time, running live sound as well...until 2000. Then I stopped...and the wagons full of new fancy stuff rolled by.
A month ago I purchased a Tascam DP-03. Some of you laugh, but one has to start somewhere. I was completely seduced by the recording for morons guide in the user manual.
The seduction was complete. I was able to track numerous guitar parts, over and over, vocal tracks. I was amazed by the ease of operation! I bought my first direct box with a cabinet simulator.
Things were going wonderfully, other than my rusty talent, until yesterday...

I did my first mixdown, and made a master track. It sounded great, considering I'd never done anything like this....so I followed the directions ( I thought ) and burnt the mix to a CD.

I hope you're still reading, and if you're snickering, I get it.

Here's the issue. The CD won't play on anything but the DP-03. Nope, not on my home computer, not on in my vehicle. I know vehicle stereos can be finicky...and perhaps there's a driver or something I need to play it on my PC...so I can download it and toss it on my social media page so my friends can enjoy. I'll be happy to provide what I can about my PC. The CD player in my AMD computer is a Hewlett Packard HD CDDVID W SH 2160B. I'm not a techno geek, but it appears the disc player in the PC can't read the disc burned on the portastudio. The Tascam unit reads the disc...? Discs are Imation CD-R 1x-16x.

Can someone help the rankest of newbies?

And please don't say do a forum search. Unless you use the right keywords, you'll spend hours searching through informative things that don't help.
 
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I am reading the manual and it seems pretty straight forward. I can only guess that you missed a step. Here could be some possible problems:

Under writing a CD
-Selecting Master Write
-Selecting a song to write
-Press F4 to select (If you don't do this, then it doesn't write anything)
-After songs selected, then press F3 (gives you a confirmation)

Looks like the main points are, Master the song so it is mixed and creates a final product to send to Audio, then follow the instructions and make sure the label is up and select the song with F4.

Now, depending on how old the CD player, some do not play CD-Rs. But it should play on your computer for sure. Go over the instructions a few more times to make sure you are following the steps. If you son't see a song in the list to select, then you didn't do the mastering step.
 
DaleVO said:
I am going to guess that you did not "finalize" the CD.
View attachment 102449
Click to expand...

OP
Yes, this is a really important step! If it is not finalized, it will not be readable.

One thing to note, once you do finalize, then you cannot write anymore to the CD-R. The nice thing about this step is, you can create the CD and keep it open to add songs later. But until it is finalized, it will not play.

Good catch Dale.
 
I appreciate all your kind responses.
I picked a fresh CD, re-burned and finalized it....and it worked! It sounds like poopie on my PCs drivers, but it works!

I'm guessing that somehow I didn't finalize the original and tried burning 2 tracks and screwed it all up. Live an learn.

I have another question....it showed 1 master track of the song, but for some reason it burned 3 tracks of the same song. I believe I may have been confused and tried to export tracks first and put in 3 tracks of the same song. Does this seem likely? Can I get rid of the two extras by over writing them in the export area? Thanks!
 
dsertdog56 said:
I appreciate all your kind responses.
I picked a fresh CD, re-burned and finalized it....and it worked! It sounds like poopie on my PCs drivers, but it works!

I'm guessing that somehow I didn't finalize the original and tried burning 2 tracks and screwed it all up. Live an learn.

I have another question....it showed 1 master track of the song, but for some reason it burned 3 tracks of the same song. I believe I may have been confused and tried to export tracks first and put in 3 tracks of the same song. Does this seem likely? Can I get rid of the two extras by over writing them in the export area? Thanks!
Click to expand...

If it is CD-R and you finalized it, it is done. Throw it away and do another.
 
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