What speed do YOU burn your Audio CD's at, and with what software?

RecordingMaster

A Sarcastic Statement
Hi there,
My band is has self-produced our entire upcoming ep. All recorded, mixed, and yes, sigh, "mastered" in my home studio by yours truly. While we DO have our 44.1 kb/s 16 bit wav audio files and high res art work sent off for printing and duplication professionally, we'd like to make some other free copies to hand out to different local outlets and radio stations for promotions in the meantime as we await the arrival of our packaged cd's. Those we plan to sell.

I'd like them to sound as good as a professional duplication house would do. That being said, any demo's I've ever duplicated at home, I've always burned on speed x1. Yes, even in year 2013 on a 2011 imac with a super fast CD drive, I still burn on speed x1. I guess I am just paranoid of glitches and such. Is this REALLY a problem anymore with today's burners built into a relatively new imac? I doubt the duplication houses burn at x1, but then again they probably have some high tech gear for that? Very ignorant here!

Not only the speed, but what program? Since I have a mac, as far as I know, straight outta the box the only software on there for burning cd's is itunes. So, you guessed it, I make a playlist for that album in itunes of the 44.1 kb/s 16 bit wav files, and burn them to an audio disc from there. Is this bad? Does itunes down-convert them to mp3 or some crappy format without telling me?

I need a cheap (preferably free) way to burn cd's from home, that sound as good as I have created them. Why let burn speed or the software degrade your material when it shouldn't have to. It's just burning a damn cd!!! Maybe I'm just paranoid and over-thinking it (as always)?

Please help. Much appreciated! Thanks! :D
 
Do a search for 'free burners'. There's loads out there for Windows.

Thanks for the reply Doc! :)
In case I didn't make it too visible in my post, I am on mac. Anyhow, I guess my second concern noted in the post is indeed the burning software as well. While I use google pretty much 99% of the time for anything at all, and still could for this, I worry about free burners. iTunes is a free burner which I already have. Are any of these cheap burners doing something detrimental to the quality? They must be or why do they sell super expensive burner software?

Someone out there must know...
 
It's about the burner quality and the blank CD quality....and the combination of the two.
If all are good, then I wouldn't waste my time burning at 1x for multi-disk duplication purposes.
If it was a master CD that you were sending out to a duplication house, that would be different....but if you are doing it yourself, do you really want to sit there and burn a 100 disks of a 60 minute CD at 1x speed???? :D

I say let 'er rip at top speed, and just check a few....if no issues, don't worry about it.
 
Ooops, I'm sorry, I didn't notice you're on Mac!

In that case, I don't know - but doesn't the Mac system already come with a CD burning tool, accessible from the file managing window? Windows can burn directly from the Explorer, so I figured it must be possible with the Mac.

Failing that, what about this?
CD Burners Downloads for Mac - CNET Download.com

The first one is free. Click on the review and see what you think. All you can really do is suck it and see. Google potential problems with it and see what issues come up. Try some test CDs and verify them afterwards, if you're worried. I know what you mean, I share the same concerns myself.
 
Mac built in burning (disk utility) wont do audio discs. Itunes does though, as you say.
I've never had any problem with itunes for radio stations etc.

At the start I only sent out proper duplicates because I our master and duplicates had ISRC codes.
Our tracks never seem to get reported properly anyway :facepalm: so now I just send out itunes burns to radio stations.
 
If all are good, then I wouldn't waste my time burning at 1x for multi-disk duplication purposes.

The advice to burn at slow speeds might have been valid ten years ago, but I've had the best results letting the software decide what speed to use, which is always the fastest speed the media and burner can handle. This really hit home a few years ago when I was making a master DVD for duplication. The slow speed versions had errors, and when I switched to 16x that went away. I'm not an expert on this, so definitely try slow and fast and see if either or both play all the way through without errors. But it makes sense to me that faster speeds make the most sense with modern media.

--Ethan
 
I've heard of others having issues using iTunes to burn audio CDs, but have no experience with it myself.
The slowest CD burn speed I can select with Roxio Creator 2010 is X4. I've typically had the default set to X8, but found I could not play a CD on my old (1987) CD player the other day, haven't retried an X4 copy to see if that solved the problem (could be just the player is getting old).
Does Reaper let you select a burn speed?
 
Modern inks and burner lasers are optimized for fast burning speeds. Burning drastically slow doesn't make sense. I either let the software decide or I set it to one speed slower than the max.
 
Modern inks and burner lasers are optimized for fast burning speeds.

Yes, I think the issue is at slower speeds the laser can "over-burn" the media. Though I ASSume the laser intensity can be adjusted by the burner on the fly as needed. But again, I've had the best results burning at maximum speed. Either way, you should always listen / watch the CD / DVD all the way through once anyway before using it as a master.

--Ethan
 
I can't find it now, but there is an article somewhere, and I also remember Massive Master saying that the ideal speed for most burners and CD's is something like X20.

Slower is not better, there's more to it than that.
 
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