Well I finally got a solution, not sure if its the best but it worked. The problem seemed to be more with the data in the files that with the Harman, so here is what I ended up doing, and I did go through about 25CDs with all the usual options of burn speed, number of tracks etc...so have to be honest here, don't know what I was doing just trial and error, there was way too much information and no error logs to look at so it was a suck it and see approach
I downloaded a piece of free software called SWITCH from
http://www.nch.com.au/software/mp3.html.
So first thing I did was save all the files from iTunes to a directory, which were all saved as the original MP3 files
then I used Switch to convert them to another directory as a WAV file
then I used switch to recreate them as a MP3
This worked for all tracks, so in the need I had about 120 tracks right up to the 700Mb limit, burnt at x8
Note: I had tried to convert MP3s to MP3s but I suspect the software didn't change some if nothing changes based on the conversion parameters that were set....perhaps ...anyway this gave me moderate success with only a boy 5 tracks being read out of 100
I guess the lesson here is that MP3s ain't MP3s and as files get passed around from system to system they all get modified somewhere along the way and then we blame Harley for a player that doesn't work...you have to feel sorry for some of the service guys who sign up hoping to pull engines apart and end up playing with MP3 formats
I am not sure the quality was that great, don't know if something got lost along the way but when my helmet is being buffeted around in the wind I am sure it will sound good enough until curiosity gets the better of me...so I will test out a commercial audio version Vs.s the MP3 one day and try and convert that instead of working with a bunch of passed around files
As they say...you get what you pay for, and maybe I shouldn't be so anal
Cheers ....Jeff