maxwell is prolly good but iv allways had good luck with the staples CD-Rs...now that you say that i dont think its the discs themselvs...i think you just burned an mp3 CD or botched the CD when yo utride to burn it. maxwell should be fine.

to show the bitrates of the files your downloading :
open up limewire, at the top of the screen in the search tab, where it sez NAME QUALETY TYPE etc right click on those boxes and in the menu that comes up go down to AUDIO and select BITRATE.

or since the bitrates are shown by default (here anyway) you can just hit REVERT TO DEFAULT.