Hi, my problem is in burning CDs. I burn CDs from downloaded music off of the internet, legally. When I play them in my CD player (car or stereo) there is too much base. I have compared my burned CDs to purchased CDs and there is always too much base. I use Roxio's easy CDcreator 5 basic. I have a Samsung CD-RW/DVD which came in my Dell laptop, Pentium 4, 256 RAM.

I think you mean "bass" and not "base" :-) How do the downloaded files (mp3s I assume) sound? You might want to try ripping files from a purchased CD (ripping them to mp3s) and burning those mp3s to a CD. If the quality/bass is the same, you can rule out hardware problems. Otherwise, there might be some setting in EasyCDCreator or a problem inherent to ripped music files. Good Luck

dBpowerAMP is a free download that will convert the mp3's to wave before burning them. You might give that a try.

What you hear is what you get! An MP3, also known as Motion Picture Experts Group Audio Layer 3 (MPEG Audio Layer 3), is an audio compression codec for use with home computers and consumer electronics. The MP3 was standardized by the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) to be used as a high performance compression scheme that uses encoding techniques that can achieve a up to a 12:1 compression ratio (saving download time and storage space), compared to CD Audio. The relatively small size of MP3 files allows for efficient storage on computer hard disks, and has become the standard for music distribution over the web. As such when it is 'converted' to Audio CD format and played through audio CD equipment in the home or car, the music will sound very different from an Audio CD or Radio broadcast of the same music. Typically one looses a bit of mid range and lots of top end [hi frequency], whilst the bottom end or Bass appears too strong. Nothing you can do to the 'conversion' which will give you back the 'sound image' that has been lost going from Audio to MP3.