When attempting to burn music to a CD using Windows Media Player a message appears saying “Invalid Alignment” and the process halts. Changing the CD writer has not resolved the problem, so I can only assume this is related to a software problem. Can you help?

Windows Media Player uses the in-built Windows CD writing engine, so the potential causes of this problem may not be limited to simply Windows Media Player but also potentially to Windows in general. As a first step, make sure that Windows CD burning is enabled. Open My Computer or Windows Explorer and right-click on the CD burner drive, then select “Properties” from the menu that appears. In the Properties window, click the “Recording” tab. Make sure that “Enable CD recording on this drive” is enabled. Second, ensure that you have the latest updates from Windows Update. Microsoft has released some updates to the in-built Windows CD writing facility, and this may resolve the problem. Third, make sure you have any third-party CD burning programs disabled. A common cause of problems with Windows CD burning are conflicts with third-party burning applications.

Should the problem continue, lower the recording speed on the CD drive. Go back into the Properties of the CD burner drive and select the “Recording” tab. Under the “Select a write speed” heading, select a substantially lower speed (such as 4X or 8X) and check whether Windows Media Player can write the CDs at this lower speed. If so, gradually increase the speed until the problem reoccurs (at which time, you will know the maximum speed at which CDs can be written without problems).

As a next step, check whether the service used to write CDs within Windows is enabled. Go to the “Start” menu > “Control Panel” and open the “Administrative Tools” control panel (you may need to first click the “Performance and Maintenance” category). Open the “Services” control panel and look for the ?IMAPI CD-Burning COM Service?. Make sure that this service is started and running.

Should all the aforementioned settings seem to be correct, we should next test whether normal CD writing within Windows XP works correctly. Drag some data to your CD writer drive within Windows, then insert a blank CD and attempt to write the data to the CD. If this works correctly, it seems the problem is related specifically to Windows Media Player not wanting to record the data. On the other hand, if Windows is unable to successfully write the data to the CD then it seems the problem is related to the Windows CD writing functionality, rather than Windows Media Player specifically. Please contact me again with the results of this test, and we can attempt to explore some more possible solutions.