I find that a commercially produced, musical CD-ROM that I can play on my living-room CD player and audio system I can also play on my computer's CD VLC player. But a music CD-ROM that I have burned with WAV files using Ashampoo-free on my computer, will not have a playlist that I can view with VLC or with Windows Explorer and will not play on my living-room CD player and audio system. Is that the situation, or have I done something wrong?
The music CD that you create won't be in the database that VLC downloads from playlist servers.
FLAC is a good audio format that saves all the music information and it can save the metadata (artist, album, title, track number, amount of tracks, year, etc.). If your home sound system is compatible with this format use it. You will need a digital audio extraction utility that can encode into FLAC and save the metadata.
When making a music CD, always select audio CD. You can make it in Windows which will use Window media center to convert the MP3 or other audio formats into CD Audio format before burning to the CD. You can also use iTunes to make a music CD. I haven't heard of Ashampoo, so a setting in Ashampoo might not be set right.
If possible burn at a slow speed for a more reliable playback.
I believe that MP3 format is a digital format, whereas WAV is analog...
Both WAV and MP3 are digital audio. They are different ways how digital audio is stored. WAV is all the information of the audio. MP3 is algorithm compressed digital audio that it loses information that your mind doesn't usually hear.