I made a data CD with my Sony 8x cdrw that consisted of MP3s that work fine in the machine it was made with but my other, older, Dell computer's CDROM will not read them. I've tried two different brands of blanks but the same problem. Any help?

Do you have MP3 codecs installed in your older computer. If not, no device will read the MP3 files.

Look in Control Panel / Multlimedia / Devices / Audio Compression Codecs. If there are no MP3 codecs installed (i.e., Fraunhofer or Lame codecs), that's the problem.

The information at About MP3 (http://www.highcriteria.com/tr_ext_res.htm) will give you some information on MP3 codecs and links to free codecs that will allow playback of MP3's.

The excellent Lame encoder is free, and will allow encoding as well as decoding of MP3. Blade encoder is also free, but Lame is considered to be of superior quality.

I've solved my own problem. I made a data disk with a music CD blank and the other computer read it perfectly. I have the same problem with my car CD player, regualr blanks work poorly or not at all but music blanks work perfectly. I guess you get what you pay for. Thanks anyway for the info :)