Good CD Burner

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spthomas

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I've had a lot of trouble burning CDs. We had a musical where I had practice CDs for each part, and we had license to copy them. They were good factory made CDs. But whenever I burn them with either of my computers, they didn't always work. And mostly about 1/2 way though the CD (say track 15 out of 30) we'd get really bad noise. Again, used two different computers, same result. I also tried to burn a compliation CD, again mostly from good factory quality CDs (not CD-Rs I burned), and still noisy, skips, etc. on several players.

I also tried three different software packages: The CyberLink Power2Go application that came on both computers, CDex, and AShampoo. No difference.

Are CD burners in laptops a problem in burning tracks and copying CDs? And if so, is there a better option, like an external CD/DVD drive? I do this a lot, and need a quality burner.

Steve
 
What brand did you use?? It DOES make a difference.

I have settled on using Taiyo-Yuden and Phillips cds and dvds and have no problems.

If you want to try a new burner, I've had excellent results from LG and Samsung burners.
 
I've tried some generic disks, and also tried Memorex and HP.

I was looking at LG and Samsung burners, and if you've had good luck with them I'll try one.

Thanks!

Steve

TimOBrien said:
What brand did you use?? It DOES make a difference.

I have settled on using Taiyo-Yuden and Phillips cds and dvds and have no problems.

If you want to try a new burner, I've had excellent results from LG and Samsung burners.
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What speed are you using? X8 or less would be a good start. I usually use X4.

alan.
 
Without going into crazy specifics, several studies on burning speed (my own included) found a "sweet spot" between 25 & 33% of a drive's rated speed (12-16x on most 48-52x drives). Reasonably lower BLER than considerably higher speeds and FAR lower than considerably lower speeds.

That said -- The drive will definitely make a difference. Don't go cheap. "Back in the day" a decent CD burner was $1500. Now you can get pretty much "great" drives for under $100.

THAT said -- all the really great drives (Plextor 712's, 716's, 755's & 760's) aren't made anymore. And even Plextor has some "Meh..." drives these days (actually, I don't think they manufacture their own drives anymore, which is a freaking shame). But the better ones aren't too bad.
 
Massive Master said:
Without going into crazy specifics, several studies on burning speed (my own included) found a "sweet spot" between 25 & 33% of a drive's rated speed (12-16x on most 48-52x drives). Reasonably lower BLER than considerably higher speeds and FAR lower than considerably lower speeds.
Click to expand...

I suppose what I was saying is that a lot of people burn at the softwares default setting of Max, which is where a lot of problems come from. Intresting studdy about burning speeds, a tech friend of mine found similar results to you. Maybe I need to up my speed to x8 or x12?

Massive Master said:
That said -- The drive will definitely make a difference. Don't go cheap. "Back in the day" a decent CD burner was $1500. Now you can get pretty much "great" drives for under $100.
Click to expand...

LOL my first CD burner (no such thing as DVD then) was a Yamaha in a separate case with scsi connection, max speed x4, price AU$1200

Alan.
 
witzendoz said:
I suppose what I was saying is that a lot of people burn at the softwares default setting of Max, which is where a lot of problems come from. Intresting studdy about burning speeds, a tech friend of mine found similar results to you. Maybe I need to up my speed to x8 or x12?



LOL my first CD burner (no such thing as DVD then) was a Yamaha in a separate case with scsi connection, max speed x4, price AU$1200

Alan.
Click to expand...

Good info. I did try a slower speed once, but I didn't really give it a good test at slower speed.

Also, what drives out there now do people think are the better ones? I have disregarded most of the no-name, $30 drives. But Samsung and LG have drives a bit higher that might be better.

And, do you think doing a diskcopy, where I just tell the software to copy the disk, will have different results than if I select the tracks individually and do a track by track copy of the disk?
 
witzendoz said:
LOL my first CD burner (no such thing as DVD then) was a Yamaha in a separate case with scsi connection, max speed x4, price AU$1200
Click to expand...
I remember when the 4X's came out -- I was going to pop for one and I wound up using my 2X's for another year or so -- Then the new machine used 8x IDE units that were only a few hundred bucks. :thumbs up:
 
spthomas said:
And, do you think doing a diskcopy, where I just tell the software to copy the disk, will have different results than if I select the tracks individually and do a track by track copy of the disk?
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The stories I could tell you...

If the disc you have is the disc you need, COPY (period).

Okay I'll tell you one of the stories -- A few years ago, a client/band called up and said they were going to make a copy of their master disc (I'd already sent 2, but that's not the story).

Instead of COPYING the disc, they RIPPED it to .wav files and used iTunes to create an audio CD.

They sent THAT disc to the plant.

FF several weeks and the band was opening 1,000 CD's and replacing them because most people were having issues with them playing in a CD player.

iTunes (along with most consumer programs I've used) will NOT create a properly formated, Red Book compliant disc. I'm not even sure what the particular issues are. I know one where the TOC wasn't in the proper area, several that "forgot" to include the 150-frame gap before the first start marker, many will allow for TAO mode, etc., etc., etc., yada, yada.

COPYING a disc is a "dumb" function -- Bit-for-bit write & check (hopefully, check) data integrity. Anything else is reassembly from raw files -- If you want the exact same disc in the end, just copy the disc.
 
Talking about brands,

Burners: I have had good results from LG and Samsung (both DVD burners), when I had my computer built up they originally put in a no name brand burner (which I did not even notice at the time, it was black and was a burner LOL), this sometimes gave trouble and there was reported errors came back from the CD pressing company, this was quickly replaced by the Samsung and no problems since. I still have an LG in my older computer that also never gave any trouble.

CDr brands: I was using TDK gold as my listening copy / copy for the car, band wants 10 copies etc discs, I thought they were all right but sometimes in the car they would skip, I know the player was a little suspect so I thought nothing of it as they played on the home stereo. Then one day I bought some Verbatim with the silver backing, these play in the car no problem so maybe the TDK gold are not as good as I thought. For masters I use Taiyo-Yuden, never had an error problem. I also recently got some HHB CDR's to try as I got them at a good price but have not used them yet so nothing to report.

One further thing is that when you burn tracks lifted from different CD's the software actually stops burning between each track and this causes errors in the start stop point, better to rip the tracks into a software and burn a whole CD disc at once. Copying a whole CD is not a problem as long as the setting is disc at once in the software. When copying CD's I actually have 2 burners installed so that the original is in one and the copy is made in the other so that the software does not have to save the CD to the drive and this is a lot quicker.

Cheers

Alan.
 
Just seen John's reply ^^^^ when I say rip I am not talking about I-toons, I mean a proper recording software with a import CD function that brings in 16bit wav files.

Cheers
 
witzendoz said:
Just seen John's reply ^^^^ when I say rip I am not talking about I-toons, I mean a proper recording software with a import CD function that brings in 16bit wav files.

Cheers
Click to expand...

The CDs that are making noise this time were done using copy. The one that had a similar problem last time was a compilation, where I had to take tracks from all over, rip them to Wav files, then create a CD with them all. The software verified them both times, but they still had noise.

Part of it might be the burner in at least one of my computers. An HP computer, not too old, but the drive "chatters" back and forth a lot when reading or writing, more than the one on the other computer that I used.

So I think my takeaways are (1) get another drive, probably an external Samsung or LG, (2) use good disks, and (3) slow down the burn rate a little.

Steve
 
spthomas said:
An HP computer, not too old, but the drive "chatters" back and forth a lot when reading or writing, more than the one on the other computer that I used.
Click to expand...

A little off topic, but when was the last time you defragmented the drive? A badly fragmented drive will make a lot more noise and run slower due to it having to jump about for information.

Alan.
 
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