I live in Ottawa, Ontario. I have several MP3 cd's in my player. It no longer functions. I took it to my dealer after trying the "remove the fuse trick" I read about on this or some other forum. Toyota is going to replace my entire radio and CD player but the service advisor's statement left me dumbfounded. He said that I was playing some "home burnt" CD's in the player and that may have caused the malfunction. I asked him where he suggested I purchase some commercial burnt discs! He had no answer. I told him that these things are not pancakes of different thickness and that no labels were afixed to them. What kind of answer is that???? When I get my new radio/CD player, I will load it with a capacity of "home burnt" CD's and see if it happens again. If so, back it goes. Is this an example of a poor quality Toyota unit or am I just unlucky?

Keith

 

We've had no issues with the changer in ours. And trust me, I've put MANY home made cd's with MP3's through it with absolutely NO issues. I haven't heard of too many people having issues with theirs, so hopefully your issue was a one-off type of problem. For the record, this is the non NAV 6 disc changer. Hope this helps.

 

Mine is a non NAv changer also. I think the advisor was smoking something!

 

ALL 4 CDs in my NAV unit are home-made mp3 CDs, and they work just fine.

 

Mp3s and WMA discs should play just fine as long as you don't stick labels on them. Try recording your next group of discs in WMA and you may hear an improvement in sound. I do.

 

I think the guy was little confused. Some burned discs may not work in some CD players due to lower reflectivity and nonuniform pits size of burn disc, but those discs should have no contact with anything inside a player except the hub that's holding it, so unless the disc was defective and warped or had some paper label that got loose, there is no difference between commercial and home brew as far as damage goes. As a matter of fact commercial discs can be defective as well (disc can warp under extreme heat and damage something inside when spinning at high speed). Most common problems with CD players are: dirty lens (you can buy cleaning discs), stuck laser assembly (you could grease the rails and make it work again but you would need to take it apart) and general electric failure where something is not connecting properly. BTW Toyota officially supports playing burned discs, it's in the manual and even says which formats the radio will support and what discs can damage the radio. I would ask him right away how he came to the conclusion that the player was damaged by disc and for two reasons: If they guy is full of it I would call him on that, if the guy really knows something about the radio I don't, it could save me from breaking another player.

 

It might be the difference between cd-rw and cd-r disks. Many players have trouble with the rw disks. Could that be your problem??

 

I use exclusively CD-RW discs, and have since I got my car 13 months ago. I do NOT put labels on them. I've had no problems whatsoever. Besides, even if your player has problems reading a disc, it will NOT physically harm the player. Of course, you can't use the small CDs nor the odd-shaped ones because these might harm the player. See your owners manual for details.

 

Hi Keith,

I'm in Ottawa too. Which dealer are you going to? I have the NAV unit now, and have had no problems with burnt disks at all. I also had the non-NAV unit for a short time, while I was waiting for the back-ordered NAV unit. No problems with that one either.

 

Ditto.

To the OP, nothing personal, but I think you were just unlucky. It is unfortuanate that the service advisor came up with such a BS excuse for it not working. Sometimes I think they just try to say something to look like they know the real issue, when they just plain don't know. Silly really.