Burning Torrent Files

[chamois]

I've downloaded a music album from a torrent site this afternoon. When I play each of the tracks (in mp3 format) off my hard drive, they sound virtually perfect.

I burnt the tracks to CD-R using Nero but it used 40X speed before I had a chance to alter it. The resulting CD (converted to CDA format via Nero) is awful on playback. It seems to "jump" in quite a few places and the the singer seems to be singing in a bucket far distant from the orchestra.

Bearing in mind that I know the download is OK, what steps can I take to remedy this situation? I realise that burning at a lower speed would have helped and I also made sure that as little as possible was running in the background on the PC during the burn. I burnt the tracks on an Imation disc but I've got Ritec ones as well. Would it be worth trying to burn on my DVD writer rather than the CD writer? Am I overlooking anything else?

Thanks.

[pug100]

Try to burn at a lower speed 40x is just asking for problems.

[chamois]

Many Thanks pug100.

[taliesin238]

My stereo sometimes does that singer in a bucket kinda thing!! What courses that on my hi fi? Keep thinking my speakers arnt in properly. Is it something to do with my surround sound settings??

[chamois]

Thanks both. Well, the mystery thickens - I eventually found the speed settings in my copy of Nero 7 Essentials and this allowed me to burn at 8X on the DVD Writer and down to 4X on the CD Writer. Unfortunately, the jumping was still there along with some dropouts on every track.

I then had a brainwave ( for me at least!). Instead of allowing Nero to convert the MP3 files to CDA and burn them onto the disc, I copied and pasted each of the MP3's one by one into the Nero main window and burnt them as MP3 files.

The resulting disc plays perfectly with no jumping in my car stereo and PC's. However, it doesn't work in my hi-fi, so now I'm looking for some software to convert from MP3 to CDA. I haven't had much luck looking for freeware so far. I also don't know yet if Nero is up to the job because if it couldn't burn MP3's from my HDD to CDA format on CD, is it going to be any better doing the same CD to CD?

Any further comments are very much appreciated. Thanks.

[pug100]

I found this comparison site, most of the software does what you want.

http://www.mp3-converter.com/mp3_to_cd/mp3_cd_ features.htm

You could also try the freeware tool Audacity which is actually a n aaudio editing programme but you may be able to use it to convert files too.

http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

[chamois]

Thanks again pug100.

Your first link was great but most of the software on there was not freeware. I did trying downloading two freeware programs, but they both wanted to install "spyware guards" and umpteen other so-called protective suites alongside themselves and filled up my temp folder with loads of rubbish. I got out quickly.

I did download Audacity via the link and the program seems able to convert mp3's to WAV files, but I'm not too sure if WAV files will play on a normal CD player. I'll have to try a test disc. Audacity doesn't seem to convert between mp3 and CDA.

I used Nero again this afternoon to try to convert from mp3 files to CDA. This time I copied the known perfect disc of mp3 files onto the HDD of a very high spec PC with 3GB of RAM. The files were then burnt to CD with Nero converting them in the process. The resulting disc was almost as jumpy as the one I did on my own PC and curiously the jumping was in exactly the same places as on the CD I burnt on my own PC. Could something be built into tracks by the record company to cause Nero to throw a wobbly at these same points and can it be decrypted like a DVD?.

In the meantime, it looks like the search is still for a good burning and conversion software combined.

Thanks again.