CDR question

[Rolland]

I know this is more of a hardware question but I'm sure you guys can help me out!Well I just bought a Yamaha 6416S CD Writer connected to an Adaptec 2903B SCSI Card.
The SCSI Card and my sound card, SB Live are sharing the same IRQ and I couldn't get the Yamaha to work because of the conflict that resulted. When I disabled SB 16 emulation it seemed okay, then I tried to make my first CD. The result was, as Dragon says, a coaster - half of the tracks were wrong or started somewhere in the middle of the song. I wonder if this could be due to the IRQ sharing between the sound card and the SCSI card....need advice!!

[drstawl]

It's not a good idea in general to try to share IRQs between your sound card and other devices. Are there none left you can use?

[Dragon]

Ouch, Rolland! Well, the good news is that you can temporarily get going making CDs...just pull out the conflicting sound card, and you'll be living proof of my oft-repeated assertion that burning CDs has nothing to do with the sound card! It would be great to hear someone actually prove it...

More long-term, though, you'll have to solve this problem. Most new cards (PCI at least) can use damn near any IRQ and the plug-and-pray BIOS straightens it out. Are you running some ancient legacy ISA cards by any chance?

[Rolland]

My IRQs from 1 to 15 are all used up. The CD-R and sound card use number 10. Both my Adaptec SCSI Card and SB Live sound card are PCI. I don't think I have any ISA cards. And how do I change the IRQ for the devices? Windows always says they can't be modified.

Well I did some experimenting yesterday and eventually disabled SB 16 Emulator (which apprently was causing the conflict) with Sound blaster still enabled, and after that I burned a couple of succesful CDs even though they were still sharing the IRQ. (I wanted to take Dragon's advice on the sound card too, but after some long consideration, I suddenly realised that if I did, there would be no sound!

I'm not sure also if the writing speed had something to do with it. The first time when I recorded the failure, it was at 6X. All the CDs I made at 4X were okay. Do you know whether the write speed has an effect on the success of the CD?

Thanks!

[Eddie N]

im pretty sure that a higher bad burn rate comes with the territory when you try to burn at 8x... the lower the burn rate , the less likely you are to burn a bad cd.. but... knock on wood , i burn at 4 times and have never had a bad burn yet ...

i think maybe your burning at 6x on a cd that only supports up to 4x burning.. but depending on your software , you might not even be able to do that... i had a 4x writer and the media that came bundled only supported 2x... so the software wouldnt let me burn at 4... hope this helps....

- eddie -