KB1: Burning audio discs doesn't work

Symptoms

  • When starting the burning process, CDBurnerXP claims that the audio image exceeds the size of the medium
  • After pressing the “burn disc” button in the burning dialog, the error “Burn process could not be started” appears
  • Tracks on a burned audio disc are too long, silent or otherwise faulty

Causes

CDBurnerXP uses an advanced audio library to analyse the lengths of audio tracks. This usually works fine, but before starting the burning process, the size of all tracks is checked a second time by the burning library. The burning library makes use of DirectShow, which has a couple of bugs and will report incorrect (longer) track lengths for VBR MP3 files.

The first symptom appears if enough miscalculations of VBR files add up, so that the overall size from the burning library's point of view exceeds the size of the medium, even though (as CDBXP correctly indicates) there would be enough space left.

The second symptom appears if all tracks do not have a sample rate of 44.1k. The burning library is not able to up- or downsample files (of any kind), and all tracks which have a different sample rate will be ignored silently. When all tracks have been ignored, the burning process cannot be started because there are no files left to burn. CDBXP does not expect this to happen, because it attempts to convert all non-working files to WAV and add them in place of the problematic files, which was considered safe. While using WAV files solves a couple of problems, it turned out that it does not help in this particular situation though, because the sample rate remains the same after conversion.

The third sympthom appears if the miscalculations of VBR files do not add up to exceed the size of the medium, so that CDBXP lets the burning library burn them to disc. This will not work, because the burning library does not only incorrectly analyse the tracks, it cannot burn them either.

Solutions

Do not burn VBR MP3 files and check the sample rate of all tracks before burning them to disc. This is obviously an “unsolution”, but later versions of CDBXP will attempt to fix the problem (target release in summer 08).

Audio files can be analysed and converted using Audacity.

Affected versions

CDBurnerXP 4.x, up to 4.0.024.