I'm sure there's a perfectly reasonable and logical explanation to the problem I'm having so I'm doing what I should have done earlier (posting it here) instead of spending the better part of this morning pulling out my hair.

I'm using Vegas 5 and a have a nearly 30 minute audio that I want to render as a CD quality (128 kbps, 44,100 hz) mp3. The problem is when I use that setting it renders but I can not hear anything when I try to play it.

The same thing happens with the 96 Kbps,44,100 hz setting but I can hear the playback if I use the 80 Kbps,22,050 hz or 64 Kbps, 22,050 settngs.

Any ideas on what the problem could be?

I have read in that past, though it may not be the correct answer in this case, that your sound card may not support those combination of sample rate/bit depth.

Just a thought,

-gb-

Greg

That might be true but I can hear the audio from a "store" bought cd. Are all store bought cds mastered using the same 128 Kbps 44,100 hz settings or do they vary?

"128Kbps, 44.1KHz" may indeed be called "cd-quality" by many MP3 encoders, but it is not the CD standard, it is an MP3 compression standard. "128" refers to a bitrate.

The actual CD-Audio standard is 16bit (wordlength) 44.1KHz (sample rate), uncompressed. And no, it doesn't vary.

Greg may be right - something with sound card support (there may be driver updates), or with the MP3 player software you're using (try other software, you probably have 2 or 3 programs that will handle it, eg. WM Player, QT, WM Classic, Vegas, Sound Forge, many DVD sw players, Winamp, etc.)

The actual CD-Audio standard is 16bit (wordlength) 44.1KHz (sample rate), uncompressed. And no, it doesn't vary.
For the sake of completeness, add to the above "2 channels (stereo)."

All told, a CDs datarate is 16 x 44,100, x 2 = 1.4112 mbps, or (dividing by 8) 176.4 kB/s.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Book_(audio_CD_standard)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CD-ROM

Thanks for the clarification, Jon, quite so. Always good to have the complete info, wouldn't want someone to be misinformed.

To highlight against the compression of 128Kbps Kevin used, CD-standard is a datarate of ~1411Kbps (what Jon said...).

In other words, the 128K MP3 compression throws away about 90% of the data. Which is great if you're trying to fit a few hundred songs in a couple GB of storage on an MP3 player, or will distribute over the internet, but not so good for most other things.

Kevin, let us know how the troubleshooting goes.