Secrets to burning an error-free CD after mastering?

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psongman

New member
Greetings, I mixed down the CD I have been working on the past few months. Then I brought the wavs into Feurio and set the amplitudes like I always do...listened and relistened, burnt some cd's to see if all was well and then prepared to make some for my friends and family.

Well, I burned about 20 at 4x and put them in some cases and gave them out. I found out from a few people that they had some problems with them playing in their cd players. I went to my uncle's and the first 10 songs played fine but the 11th one acted up a bit and the last one stopped. I tried it over again and the 12th one played fine. His cd player on the computer was really dirty though so I am going to clean it for him. I will cut this long winded tale short.

So, I bought the best Taiyo Yuden cd's from Supermedia store, checked and rechecked after burning most of them but want to know why others are getting these errors, and what I could do to cut down on this happening? I did try burning them at 8x as I heard that was a myth about slow burning like at 4x and they were right, they sounded just as good or better. I love the whole CD phenomen as it is easy and cheaper to do actually, but I am now finding out that tapes did'nt have these problems in the playing dept. Please get back to me if you have any methods that have worked for you in producing homemade CD's that will correct any of these errors I am encountering, thanks for listening, Derrick
 
its the burner. get the plextor drive that does error checking. It only puts out about 1/3 of the errors that my sony type drive does. then get some good software that burns red-book standard CD's. then after burning with the plextor drive you can double check it for errors. there are type 1 and type 2 errors and I'll leave it to someone with more experience to explain that because I dont remember exactly. but its been discussed on here before, you might find it with a search.
 
Hi, well, the burner worked fine on Christmas CD's, I burned with absolutely no experience around 2 years ago and many since then. Now, I have learned to fine tune, check and recheck, and I do, but for some reason, these good cd's are not playing that well on the cd players of others. I do know that I tried out higher speeds, and that is true about the slower burning not necessarily better assumption. In fact, I listened really closely, and 8x seems to be one of the best speeds. The newer brands of CD's, TY included, are made for faster speed burning. I mean, I know burning at a faster speed isn't good for the pit created, but there must be some happy medium for these procedures.

Thanks for the some of the help. Sorry, my cd writer won't go down to 1x and that Plextor costs like well over $100. If it is really worth it, I will plunk out the money, manana, so keep me interested. Gratefully, psongman
 
Drives get old, so that may explain why you have a higher error rate two years later.

Since you'll be shopping for a new drive . . . :D

Plextors not only do a great job burning, they also come with software that will tell you the error rate on the CD. FALKEN nailed it right on the head, in my book!
 
Also keep in mind that older CD players have problems playing CD-Rs sometimes. It could be that some of the people you gave discs out to just have old players.
 
Yeah, I think it is the cd players they are trying to play my cd on. However, again those commercial cd's seem to plow their way through those old lasers and still play. My assumption is the cd's you record with your computer, even if set up well, are still not as ironclad for replay as the commercial ones. They probably have some special procedure when they replicate that avoids those small soft errors and can be used by most cd players.

The other reason I was asking, is, perhaps there is a better prep that you can do on those wavs you turn into cdas, that will discourage these errors, think you know what I am seeking, thanks for the responses, psingman
 
mshilarious said:
Plextors not only do a great job burning, they also come with software that will tell you the error rate on the CD.
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You do have to read the details and (I recommend) a few reviews when you shop around, though. Not ALL Plextors come with the Plextools software, and not all Plextors are made the same. The best of the Plextors are among the best you can get, I agree, but not all of them are in the same category. Stick with the ones that get the best reviews for accuracy and brand robustness by those print or on-line magazines that put the drives through rigorous bench and user testing, and that indeed come with the excellent Plextools test software.

And as far as commercial CDs vs. homemade CD-Rs or CD-RWs, they are three different animals. A CD-R is not the same as a "glass" CD, and a CD-RW is not the same as a CD-R. Older CD players can indeed have problems reading CD-Rs, and even more problems reading CD-RWs.

The advice given so far is in this thread is all excellent. Let me reiterate and eadd a couple as well:

- Stick with a burn rate of about 1/4th to 1/5th of the maximum rating of the drive just to be on the safe side. While with a good drive, well-matched media (more on that next) and good software, it is possible to burn at faster rates with minimal errors (I have a three year old TDK VeloCD that performes as well, if not in some ways better, than my year-old Plextor at higher rates), a good general rule of thumb is to keep the burn rates low.

- Match the CD-R media to the manufacturer's specifications and recommendations of your burner. Almost every burner comes with a list of tested and recommended brands of media, and sometimes even comes with a list of brands the manufacturer does not recommend based upon their own testing. Stick with brands near the top of the manufacturer's recommended list. Also, when possible, stick with CD-R media that is rated at speeds at least as fast as the maximum burn speed of your drive, even if you do not plan to burn that fast.

- Though this is not as much of a problem as it used to be two or three years ago, you might want to stick with CD-R and stay away from CD-RW. There has been a history of lower relaibility rates with RW media. While that may (or may not) be as much of a problem today, I find it best to err on the conservative side; especially when you also consider possible compatability issues in the older CD playback machines as well. If you're worried about throwing too many drink coasters into your local landfill, you can always to test burn "premasters" to CD-RW just to make sure your mix, mastering, and burning sound Ok in the way of sonics and levels (if not error rates), and then burn your final "self-masters' to CD-R after you get the rest worked out OK.

- Use quality burning software that not only gives you redbook (which the vast majoriny does these days), but also that have a burn-and-test option that will test the CD-R for major errors immediatly after performing the burn.

- On software that gives you an option to create a "finalized" and a "non-finalized" audio CD, stick with the "finalized" option for your final burns. This is again a precaution to help with compatability with older CD players.

There's not a whole lot you can do with any kind of reliable certainty as far as the quality of the mix itself to help keep error rates low, except maybe keep digital clipping to a minimum, or better yet, non-existant. Other than maybe some potential problems some software may have in properly understanding or translating digital overs, any mix is just a bunch of ones and zeros, and quality software and burning harware should be able to burn them all equally well on average regardless of what the exact order of ones and zeros actually is, especially if the above advice on matching the media with the burner are followed OK.

HTH,

G.
 
psongman said:
My assumption is the cd's you record with your computer, even if set up well, are still not as ironclad for replay as the commercial ones. They probably have some special procedure when they replicate that avoids those small soft errors and can be used by most cd players.
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My understanding is that the commercially replicated CDs are identical to the CD-R they were pressed from. If the original had erros so will the replicants. I just got home from travelling, the model I have is the PX-716A. Never had a single problem since buying it. But you are correct, it is expensive.

I usually have my CD-R's printed at a copy store so that they look professional. I can't stand those stick on labels. You might just go that route and also have the copy store burn them too. Of course I don't really trust their burners so I get them to print on the blanks and then burn them myself.
 
The CD's may be identical in data to the original CDR, but the media itself is different. Some CD players do indeed have trouble playing CDR's, usually the older model CD players. You won't get 100% compatibility with CDR's, that's just the way it is.

I use a Plextor writer and Taiyo Yuden CDR's, that combination arrived at after a lot of internet message board searching and questions asked, plus a lot of experimentation. The combination has worked out well so far. But I used to have a Sony CD player that just wouldn't play CDR's correctly, no matter the manufacturer of the media or the writer. In the cases of those balky CD players there is no magic bullet, your CDR simply will not play correctly. Manufactured on a true compact disc, and it will.

I generally burn audio CD's at 2x or 4x, but data CD's I'll just go with whatever the fastest available speed is.
 
SonicAlbert said:
I generally burn audio CD's at 2x or 4x, but data CD's I'll just go with whatever the fastest available speed is.
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Yeah, there is a difference between burning an audio CD-R and a data CD-R. I believe (someone correct this if it's wrong) it's because of the data formatting itself; data is written to a data CD-R much like it's written to a hard drive or data tape, there is a data vertification scheme of some type (some version of CRC error checking, the use of parity bits, or something along those lines) to ensure data validity.

A data CD-R is really not different from the computer's pont of view from a hard drive in that respect. Just as one never pulls up a word processing doc or a spreadsheet with an actual data error in it (unless the file or the media itself becomes corrupted), the effective result is the same with a data CD-R. It's for that reason (I believe) that data CDs are more tolerant and can be burned at high speed (write my data CDs at 48-56x all the time myself.)

Audio CDs, however, while still usind the same type for format for the actual data (WAV and CDA are basically the same at the core), audio CDs do not use the same kind of data sectoring and data integrety/data checking wrappers, and are therefore more vulnerable to bit integrity problems that can increase with higher burning speeds.

G.
 
For those interested in the "ugly details" see:

http://www.ee.washington.edu/conselec/CE/kuhn/cdaudio2/95x7.htm

Just to add a bit to the info above. Stay away from paper labels. Over time they can warp a CD and potentially can cause rotation imbalances that can cause errors at higher speeds if using them for duplication. Plextools is your best friend for a relatively inexpensive CD checking tool (as mentioned above).

You can also try extracting the data from a burned CD-R and perform null tests against the original data, but this is usually only done for the master (and one reason why ME's charge more for burning a CD-R than most people think is called for).
 
First, there are no error free CD's - all discs have errors.

Second, 1x is rarely the right answer anymore, unless you are using an ancient burner. The best speed depends on the burner/media combination used - using some good discs (such as Taiyo Yuden) with a good burner (like a good Plextor) at a medium speed (we cut everything @ 8x here - this yields what is consistently the lowest errors rates with our drives/media).

Finally, manufactured discs are *not* direct clones - as the data is extracted on its way to the LBR, it goes through error correction - IOW, aside from CU's, the data that hits the LBR is perfect and error free.
 
Ironklad Audio said:
burn at 1X
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Doesn't necessarily apply to today's media and recorders (as pretty much stated in an above post). Some recorders won't even goto 1x speed - at least computer based ones. I believe home audio component CD recorders burn at 1x, but am not 100% positive.
 
The advantage of low-speed burning is by no means a myth. It has less to do with the particular burner or the quality of the CD media than it has to do with error correction schemes of the Redbook and CD-ROM specifications.

As long as we’re talking Redbook CD I always recommend a 4X or less burning speed for audio. Data and audio files are indeed completely different animals because of the error correction algorithms unique to audio. This is a very complex issue with more than simple A/B comparisons proving or disproving the soundness of the practice.

Kuhn’s online lectures are a great source of info to delve deeper into the particulars… see the link that masteringhouse posted above.

Remember, commercial CDs are pressed, not written, so they don’t have the errors we see in CD-R (they have there own problems).

All one needs to know is to use a quality burner, and if it has seen better days get a new one. Keep it clean and make your important copies at low speed.

A couple more thoughts… if you’re consistently seeing higher error rates on the last one or two songs I would suspect a malfunction of the laser Tracking/focusing system as it moves further from the center of the disc on the writer. Maybe time for an upgrade.

Another factor is older CD players not being able to deal with 700 MB (80 minute) CD-R media, even if they can read CD-R.

~Tim
:)
 
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bblackwood said:
Finally, manufactured discs are *not* direct clones - as the data is extracted on its way to the LBR, it goes through error correction - IOW, aside from CU's, the data that hits the LBR is perfect and error free.
Click to expand...

whoa what does all that lingo mean?
 
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