Audio CD with normalized volume will not play in CD player

#1

I have one of those 400-CD carousels made by Sony, vintage ~2003. Today I burned a standard audio CD using Nero, which I’ve done many times before with no problem, but this one wouldn’t play in the carousel; the box simply couldn’t read the disc. After various trials I found that the problem is that I selected volume normalization, which I haven’t used before. If I choose the same set of songs and write them without normalization, they play fine; but if I tell Nero to Normalize them, the resulting CD won’t play in the carousel even when all other settings are the same. (It will play in my other CD-ROM drive and in a portable player.)

FYI, I have an older version of Nero (Express 6.6.1.4), but this shouldn’t matter. For normalizing, Nero is using the default RMS method at 20%. The CD writer is a new Lite-On LH-20A1H, writing to an ordinary 700MB CD-R disc (tried both Memorex and Sony with the same results).

Any idea what’s going on here? I’d like to use Normalization for the obvious reasons, but I don’t understand why it makes a difference to compatibility. Are there any known problems with this version, or with Normalization generally for standard audio CDs?

Thanks for any suggestions!

#2

A followup twist:

If I re-rip the audio CD that was created with normalized volume (using MusicMatch, where I keep my complete CD database), so that it creates a new set of .mp3 files, and then use those with Nero to burn a new audio CD without specifying normalization, it still won’t play on the carousel.

It looks as though, when it does the normalizing, Nero puts something into the audio CD file data that the carousel doesn’t grok, and this is preserved through the conversion into MP3 and back to standard .cda again.

It’s bizarre …