I just made a music CD using Iomegas HotBurn Software and have a question. I wanted to make a music CD using MP3s which I have been saving in my hard drive. I converted these MP3s from wave files which I burned from existing music CDs I have. Here's the question:

When I used HotBurn to make the music CD-R, the songs burned onto the CD-R as CDA music files and not WAV files. The CD plays fine in my car's 8 year old Sony CD player but the files only show that they are about 2Kbytes per song when I look at them on Explorer. If I look at their properties, they show about 30 kilobytes per song. The MP3 files I copied them from are about 2.5 Megabytes per song and the original WAV files on the original music CDs are about 25 megabytes per song. The songs seem to play OK but why are the files so small? Seems like there is some compression going on that I don't understand. How can only 30 kilobytes per song sound good? Or are my ears just not hearing the poorer sound? Need some technical sense, please.

Ray K
Orlando, Florida

The files you are looking are the actual WAV files, burned that way so CD players and CD-ROMS can playback it. Its how the AudioCD format was designed in the first place...

In order to see them as normal wav files, you need a modified VXD driver called CDFS.VXD that works only under Win9x platform.

Visit www.cdrinfo.com - The Recording Authority

(in reply to Rfkammer)

John, Thanks for the explanation. That would explain why 30 MP3s burned to a CD take up almost the whole Disk. But as for the CDFS.VXD file, I checked on explorer and I do have that file. I'm running windows 98 SE and it's located in the windows/system/Iosubsys file. Do I have to reconvert the CDA music files back to WAV using one of the converters I've got in order to see their actual size?

Ray K
Orlando, Florida

(in reply to Rfkammer)

You need to get the modified CDFS.VXD to see the actual tracks

Visit www.cdrinfo.com - The Recording Authority

(in reply to Rfkammer)