I bought several albums on Amazon recently and burned them all to a CD in the MP3 format. When I inserted the disc into the car CD player, two albums wouldn’t play. I compared the MP3 files from an album that worked to one that didn’t, and couldn’t find any notable differences, so I tried burning the CD again… three times.

After it still didn’t work, and I comfirmed that the issue was not with the computer, burner or disc, I tried re-encoding the songs from the albums that wouldn’t play, which solved the problem.

I used NCH’s Switch MP3 Converter Software for that. After you download and install the software, you’re greeted with an explorer-like interface. Here is what you need to do:

1. Click on the “Add Folder” button to add the folder containing the songs you want to convert.
2. Below the newly added songs, click on the “Browse” button to choose a new folder on where you want to save the converted songs.
3. Click on “Encoder Options” and make sure that your “Bitrate” is set to the same bitrate as your original songs — you can get that info by right-clicking on one of those MP3s in Windows Explorer, then click “Properties”, then on the “Details” tab and note the “Bit rate” under the “Audio” header e.g. 256.
4. Click on the “Convert” button toward the very bottom right.

That’s it! Now you can burn that album to a disc and it should play in your car.

Note: I mentioned Amazon because I’ve never had this problem with any other MP3 site, but this solution will not just work on MP3s from Amazon.