What type of files are on a CD that plays in a car

Wave files. Maybe if you post a question/issue would help you better.

CD players do not generally support wave files. They support music CD tracks, MP3s, and sometimes WMA files.

I believe the file extension is .CDA

The actual files on the CD are waves. A regular CD, the music CD tracks, if you just copy them onto a PC, will be wave files.

From Wiki:

"though a WAV file can hold compressed audio, the most common WAV format contains uncompressed audio in the linear pulse code modulation (LPCM) format. The standard audio file format for CDs, for example, is LPCM-encoded, containing two channels of 44,100 samples per second, 16 bits per sample"

Perhaps. I tried burning .wavs onto a CD to play in my car, it didn't work. If I put the same songs into Nero and told it to burn as an audio CD, it worked fine. It might have been a file extension issue, as I know .cda does exist. Perhaps you need to rename the .wav files?

Lucky for me I had an aux jack in my stereo so I just used my mp3 player.

You can't just stick the files on the CD, you need track info and CD file system formatting for the player to read it as a disk. I've been playing with audio for a while though, and the base tracks on the CDs is wave files, learned that back around 2000 when I was messing with a lot of disk ripping to mp3.

But I'm sure that Blaine there is not quite asking this, more of "how do I get music on a CD that will play in a car stereo".

Most modern car CD systems should be able to play MP3 files that are burnt onto a disc.

You should try and find out which CD player you have in your car and Google for the information you need.

The CD format (the "Red Book") was developed with no thought to the idea that they could be used in computers. The original format assumed that all discs would be read-only and the only content would ever be music. As such, "pressed" music CDs do not contain "files" or a "file system" as they are used in computers. They contain "tracks" which hold data which is equivalent to the data in a ".WAV" file, although it's in a different format. When you put one of these discs into a computer Windows reads the raw data and simulates the appearance of "files", but they're not really there on the disk in the same format as they would be on a burned CD.

All music players can read these types of CDs, but to the best of my knowledge there is no computer drive that can burn a CD in this format. Computer drives create CDs using an industry standard file system that contains files and folders. But I could be wrong on this - it may be that you can capture the raw data of a music CD in an ".ISO" file and then use it to burn a copy in the same format.

Because CDs burned in computers have become so popular most modern players will accept and play CDs with computer file systems and file formats such as ".WAV" or ".MP3". But most of the older players can't do this.