I'm going to assume that this was all an exercise in character building, to teach me patience, and compassion for others, and not to wait until the last possible second every single time something is due, especially when I've had weeks.

edit: to state the painfully obvious, did you go through any settings screens to check?

So the consensus is that I'm just going to have to limit my CD to 14 songs because I know the CD will burn and play correctly that many - even though we don't know why it won't work now?  Where are those big girl panties?

This looks 'normal'.

This looks 'normal'.

That is what is killing me.  I do this all the time.  I was hoping there was something in the latest version of iTunes that I need to toggle because everything seems to be working like it is supposed to.  The CD has 62 minutes and 38 seconds of songs and is 627.6 MB both of which should give me plenty of wiggle room.  It just won't play the last couple of songs.  I can't believe I wasted all that time!  Well, at least I have some shiny new coasters.

There is a balance between both time (80 minutes) and size (700MB, I think).  You could have plenty of "time space" and if the files are very high quality, you could have run out of "size space", or vice versa.

EXACTLY!!!  So I thought I was safe and spent hours burning the rest.  Not to mention the hours put into building the mix.  And now I have to pick just 14 songs?  How am I going to do that?  Tempted to use another program to rerip the songs and make the copies but that would mean they would be copies of copies and at some point I think you'd be able to hear that.

Since everybody has been making mix CDs recently maybe you can help me - I've made 12 copies of a mix and not a single one will play song 15 or beyond.  So I made the CD shorter, and still, song 14 is the last song that will play.  Does this mean that I have to cut my CD down to 14 songs because I think I will cry if I have to do that.  I am using iTunes, recently updated to the latest version.  I am utterly wiped out right now - it took me four hours to make the CDs and to not have any of them work...
 
And yes, they all work on the computer or I wouldn't have kept making them.  But when I decided to do a test run on the car stereo I discovered the problem.

are you burning CD or MP3 ??

I didn't think about the encoding rate.  But - and this is my main complaint - why would iTunes burn a CD if it isn't playable?  Every other program I've used gives you an error message if you try to put too much on a CD.  WHY would it let me burn a CD if I can't play the CD!!!

Interesting. If you put the CD in, all the tracks show? I wonder how that works — you'd think "full" was full...

Depends on the song, doesn't it? Longer track  / higher encoding rate (or whatever)?

Actually, the burned CD will play in the computer.  I checked that first thing.  And I thought I was safe.  So I burned the other 11.  But then when I tried to play one in the car it woudn't work past song 14.  So I got the others, and none of them worked.  So I thought maybe I had done the math wrong.  Got rid of one of the songs but that didn't help.
 
And now I am DISTRAUGHT!

I take it you mean that the playlists play on your computer, and not the burned CD itself. As PoundPuppy says, regular CDs have a limit.

Look on the blank CD for a time limit. I usually buy the 80 minute ones. On an 80 minute CD I can fit 19 or 20 songs .

Since everybody has been making mix CDs recently maybe you can help me - I've made 12 copies of a mix and not a single one will play song 15 or beyond.  So I made the CD shorter, and still, song 14 is the last song that will play.  Does this mean that I have to cut my CD down to 14 songs because I think I will cry if I have to do that.  I am using iTunes, recently updated to the latest version.  I am utterly wiped out right now - it took me four hours to make the CDs and to not have any of them work...
 
And yes, they all work on the computer or I wouldn't have kept making them.  But when I decided to do a test run on the car stereo I discovered the problem.

Since everybody has been making mix CDs recently maybe you can help me - I've made 12 copies of a mix and not a single one will play song 15 or beyond.  So I made the CD shorter, and still, song 14 is the last song that will play.  Does this mean that I have to cut my CD down to 14 songs because I think I will cry if I have to do that.  I am using iTunes, recently updated to the latest version.  I am utterly wiped out right now - it took me four hours to make the CDs and to not have any of them work...
 
And yes, they all work on the computer or I wouldn't have kept making them.  But when I decided to do a test run on the car stereo I discovered the problem.