Thanks Maxter: That's not what I wanted to hear, but any discs that are that important I will copy then and give them the label I need.

Sounds like maybe the darker color thing mentioned above may also play into it. My 2001 Grand Cherokee ( factory am/fm/cd/casette player) will not recognize burned CDs. i am currently using my laptop with XP and have tried windows player, I-tunes and BurnerXP but haven't noticed any different results from any of that different software. After going thru about 30 cds burning at different speeds and formats, I finally got it to occasionally recognize one I burnt at around 4X using PCM .wav (uncompressed) format but to recognize and play I usually have to fast forward it thru a couple of songs while it is doing the initial read. Once it recognizes and starts playing then will usually play the whole CD but doesn't always work for whatever reason. I may try the label thing or try to find some of the "dark" cds to see if that matters. We have a 98 KIA witn an aftermarket cd player and it will play just about anything burnt to cd no matter format or speed.

Be aware that a CD-R and CD+R are 'write once' and read many times media. That is, once a apace on the disk has been written to, it is no longer available for writing. You can delete a file, but the space it occupied will not be available anymore. Now this part, I'm not to sure about - I'd have to do some checking - but, I recall that a space is reserved for the directory which is about 50 KB. Anytime the disk is 'opened' and new files added, a new directory must be written when the disk is closed. This new directory gets written into ther reserved space and the space where the old directory was gets marked off limits. After awhile, the disk runs out of reserved space for directories and can longer accept new files because there is no more "new" unwritten space available either for new directories or for files. Clicking on "properties" will show the disk not full when in fact it has no more 'new' space to write to. CR-R and CD+R work best for a one time mass file transfer, i.e., 20 files are written to CD from a hard drive in one drag-and-drop opertion. Or maybe, a folder (containing a bunch of files) is dragged and dropped to the CD. One should check for the amount of space needed for the files, else the copy process will balk before the entire set of files have been transferred (when the file transfer runs out of space). CDRW refers to read and write. It operates just like any other magnetic media, e'g', floppy disk and hard drives. The space on a CDRW can be erased and written to again. It does have a limited re-write time, however. Any one area can be rewritten from 1000 to 10,000 times and then becomes 'worn out'. I have heard arguments both pro and con about which is the best media for archiving - CR R or CDRW. The CD R proponents say that since any specific region on the disk is written only once, it will retain the data best of all; Others say that a CDRW can do just as well so long as it has not been overwritten on a regular basis. I tend to use CDRW for everything and format before using. I keep a few formatted disks on hand. In that way, I don't have to think about a bunch of stuff when I suddently need a CD - I just grab one out of my formatted stash and go.

Is it a Windows PC or a Mac? What program are you using? There is are two different formats - a Data CD is different from an Audio CD. Not physically (a blank is a blank) but relative to the protocols used in when the CD is recorded, so that when it's later put into a player or drive, the hardware knows which it is. Unless you're using a program that assumes audio, like iTunes, you usually need to specify which format to use. Some car CD players will only play CDs made using "audio format", others will use either. Is this problem happening with a fresh, previously unused CD blank?