Its not vodoo, it is design. The range of laser color used in DVD players will not read CD-Rs. If you burn music onto a CD-RW disk however, it should read (theheat sensitive ink dots are a different color. A few DVD players have two separate lasers and these are the only ones that read CD-Rs and DVDs. Within CD players, the reliability of CD-R reading is very variable. Often the error correction will simply declare a disk unreadable or part of a disk (causing skips). The basic design of the transport will determine how tolerant it is. The popular mid-fi Marantz units (modded into the Ah Tjobe as well are VERY poor at reading CD-Rs, for example). I use an ARCAM Alpha 7se as a transport because it reads almost all CD-Rs. Since manufacturers don't care about this per se, you really must try out a large assortment of CD-Rs (brands, music, data, etc.) on a unit before buying if this is important to you. DVD players are just not an option unless you burn everything yourself onto CD-RW disks which are more expensive than CD-Rs and somewhat less reliable in the long-term.