Best burning speed

[Black_Hawk]

I'm into burning high quality audio CDs for concerts (you know the ones where you don't have the band with you, you just sing; whatever it's called...) and I talked to a few people and they say that I can get the best quality when I burn at the slowest speed (1x, 150kb/s if I'm not mistaking). That's fine with me if they say so but I want to know why. Also, my burner supports (?) only 4x (600kb/s) minimum. Does this depend on the burner I have or do I have to buy really expensive CDs for slow burning? I heard that there are CDs that cost 10€??? BTW, my burner is NEC ND 2510

 

[Blues]

I typically burn at 1 speed below my burner or disc max speed this causes fewer coasters for me and I don't notice any lowered quality with the equipement I have if you want to try for thier suggestion I would say you could go easily as low as 12x with out any complications but it also depends on your machines overall preformance capabilities

 

[Black_Hawk]

Yes, but anything above 4x seems to skip a second or two of the track on their CD player, which is BTW a very good one. And they tell me that 4x is the maximum that will be w/o any read errors. If they had a computer instead of a CD player backstage it would be a whole different story

 

[Bryce W]

The burn speed shouldnt effect the quality of the CD and typically if a burn misses a few steps because it burnt too fast then the whole burn will fail.

Burn speed issues are typically caused by something not keeping up with the burn and this can be caused by things such as having a slow computer, doing process intesnsive things while burning (eg, gaming, playing music) or incorrectly configured cables such as a harddrive and CDRom on the same IDE cable.

Another possibility is the CD brand, although I have never seen this issue with CDRs, its very common with DVDRs.

So here are some questions to pinpoint this:

What are the specifications of the computer?

Were you doing anything CPU intesive at the time (gaming or playing music)?

Who built your PC, a friend or a store?

What brand of CDs are you using?

 

[Black_Hawk]

CPU AMD Athlon XP 2600+, 1GB RAM PC3200, I think that this is definitely not an issue, I wasn't doing anything at the time of the burning, I got my config from a computer shop and I'm using Verbatim CD-Rs. Dunno what's the problem if my PC is ok...

 

[Bryce W]

Ok, that rules out alot as your PC is fast enough to burn properly, you werent doing anything CPU intensive (and your specs were good enough if you were anyway) and Verbatim as a brand is fine (unless you have pirate ones).

Does the skipping only happen on their CD player? or other CD players as well?

 

[Black_Hawk]

Well that is the problem: EVERY CD player does it. It seems like they are right. A guy explained it to me like this: At higher speeds the chance of skipping some clusters is higher. But I have buffer underrun protection enabled and I guess that if some of the clusters were skipped the burn proces would be reported as a failed one. And I ALLWAYS verify the compilations. Ah, well, looks like I'm gonna have to switch to my prehistoric burner (it burns on 1x, 2x and 4x LOL).

 

[Blues]

I have had this problem when I burn at the max speed of a drive or when as bryce said I have too much running in the background

so if you are not running too much in the background then I ask are you using maximum speed because most drives I have used fail to work properly at thier maximum speed to I go with the speed just below that so try that otherwise could be cheap disc also if you have anti-virus and/or firewalls they can be system hogs and cause the disc not to burn properly anyways I have a more antiquated(sp?) system and have not had this problem except when burning at max speed or when burning while having programs running

final thought is what is the burning application being used?

 

[Black_Hawk]

I'm using Nero 6. I'll try at one speed setting below the max burning speed. Thou, I dunno if the guys will be happy if it skips again, I'll test the disc on a few CD players before putting it on stage

 

[Blues]

Im at a loss I really can't place my finger on what the problem is... what is the file type for the audio and does it sound fine from a computer? sorry if im asking already answered questions Im just at the end my rope her on why only things I can think of now is faulty hardware ie the burner or the disc themselves

 

[Black_Hawk]

The files are in .cda format ofcourse. And they sound ok on my pc, everything I burn works fine on it. The only problem with my pc at this point is that it keeps having strange boots, it just restarts with no reason, and like 50 times like that and after that it MAY boot to my desktop. Every new boot is a whole adventure. But this burning thing (skips on cd players) started from the begining when my pc was totally fine, so I would say it has nothing to do with my pc acting weird now. Looks like a format will be the only soultion...

 

[Bryce W]

The fact that it works fine on computers but not on CD players is weird. Your best bet is to change CDs brands. Some devices dont like certain brands. Give it a shot.