I have some lecture disks given to me which are in .wav format and play fine on the computer. If I wanted to play these on my audio player or in the car, which format should they be in? Are there programs on the web which would convert these files?

Not sure which format your audio player uses, but there is a free converter here:
http://www.nch.com.au/switch/

How do I ascertain the formats of my audio player and in the car - does it say so anywhere, I have long since lost any literature on these.

If you have the make and model, you should be able to go to the manufacturer's website and get the format info without a problem. I do know that when you copy them, most external CD/Audio players can't read the CD-RW format. You usually need to use a CD-R format instead.

I hope I am answering along the line of what you're actually asking.

I downloaded a .wav to MP3 encoder and tried that. Happy to say that the disks played both on my audio player, car and computer. Many thanks.

Glad to hear it, Bb! It's always great when something works out the right way.

Some cars and CD players can play .mp3 formats. However, I believe that all audio CD players can play .wav format. (Although this does take up a lot more space, it works...)

Not my audio player - both the car and audio player would not recognise .wav. You would think they would make them all the same!

That's odd because CDs actually are .wav formatted...

When you created your disk, did you choose 'create audio CD' or "create data CD"? The audio CD will create something with the .wav files that can be read in the CD players whereas the data format won't necessarily.

I was given the home made disks by the author of the lectures and he said they were in .wav format. I copied them into my computer and used a .wav to MP3 downloaded converter and burned them on to new disks. These are the ones which worked. The former ones would only work on the computer.

Reading thru this thread I thought I'd mention a really cool program thats out there. I know there's a lot of free programs that you can use to convert the format of music, video's or what not but this one is really good but it's not free, it costs about $38. It's called Polderbits.

You can do so much with this program. I do a lot of work with music at home here and run Hillbilly Studios where I do a lot of CD design, covers, inserts and the whole thing. I use this program a lot. You can convert music to any format you want. It's also a sound recorder. That means you can record any sound that comes thru your computer and save it in any format you want. You can also use it to upload your old cassette tapes to your computer and convert them to MP3's and burn them to a disc. I'm told you can also upload your old VCR tapes and convert them to put on a DVD too but I've never tried that.
As an old musician and singer myself from way back. I think this is a great program. I've used it to convert the cassette tape album I recorded years ago into MP3's and now have it on CD's
You can get a free 2 week free trial of this program before you buy it. If you don't buy it after 2 weeks they'll give you another 2 weeks free. Try it and see what you think of it before you buy it, and if you need any help with it I'd be happy to help you.

Edit: We cannot link to commercial products Dave.

Thanks Dave. I will try the free trial as I seem to get a lot of home made discs in all sorts of formats, some of which play in one media and not others.