I was told that all CD players are capable of reading MP3's and that the reason they don't is because of a chip installed by the manufacturer. If this is the case, does anyone know how to get around that chip if it is possible? If not, are there any other formats that cd players can read besides wave? The goal here is to be able to put more than 20-25 songs on 1 cd. As MP3's its possible to burn at the least, a hundred songs on one cd...as wav, I can only get about 20-25 songs per cd. Thanks.

That is not the case -

There ARE CD players made that will play both conventional and MP3 CDs. A regular player though has no such capability. Try looking at

MP3.com Hardware Reviews

for a sampling of the products available... there are portable units in the under $100 range that offer that capability.

100 songs on one cd? are you burning a data cd? or are these mp3s only 1-2 minutes long?

Consider a typical MP3 song file is 3 to 5 Megabytes in size (128K sample rate) and regular CD can hold 640 Megabytes... assuming worst case of 5 Meg per you can get 128 songs on one CD. I have a CD with 145 songs on it... of course as mentioned previously you must have a cd player capable of playing MP3 files. Such a CD is really just another Data CD, the same as you would archive other types of files to.