Burning a CD - settings tips?

[teach1st]

I certainly end up with a lot of coasters when trying to burn CD's. Does anybody have a source with good tips for burning - especially settings, i.e. cache?

[Maverick]

There's no way to answer that for sure. Different drives do different things and require different settings for different media on different systems. Are you getting coasters from simple disc copies, MP3 to CDA audio discs, copy-protected software, something else? There are at least a million things that could be going wrong, so you need to be very specific on what you're doing.

A few general hints:

1) Read the FAQ from the manufacturer of your drive. Some might require different settings than what is actually specified in the manual. Also see if they have online help forums. If there's something special about the drive configuration that causes bad burns, it will have been discussed there ad infinitum and many solutions will be listed.

2) Make sure you have the latest drivers and see if there's a firmware update that you might be missing.

3) Use good media. Don't use that generic 100 discs for $14.99 junk that CompUSA has on sale every other week. Some really high quality media is available for very little and pays for itself.

5) Use good software to burn. I like Nero the best. Adaptec's Easy CD Creator is indeed easy (almost idiot proof) but is unstable on many systems. If it runs on yours try that. But try to stick with one of the major releases like Nero, Feurio or Easy CD Creator.

6) Make sure you're burning at the right speed. Trying to burn old 8x media at 16x will often fail.

7) Is the drive Burn-Proof (or other similar technology)? If it has Burn-Proof, is it turned on in the software settings? If it isn't, don't do anything else while the disc is burning. A buffer underrun will ruin the disc.

8) Experiment a little. Get a CD-RW disc and fiddle around with some settings. That way even if you screw up and it's a coaster, you can just erase the disc and start all over again without wasting any blanks. Once you get it down, stop using CD-RW discs. They suck.

But between checking your drive manufacturers latest info and using a good piece of burning software, odds are your problem will go away.

[esc]

You did not give us an analysis what went wrong and which OS you are using. Maverick provided a good bag of hints. Let me add a few more.

To my experience there a several different sources of possible errors:

Hardware installation problems: Hardware not correct installed, especially SCSI - termination missing, wrong cables, too long cables (outside of SCSI-specification), Y-bus structure, etc. Intermittent errors are possible and quite difficult to resolve. Especially if you leave standard ways.

Driver and bus setup problems: drivers buggy – try to get new ones. SCSI-drivers and the bus itself can easily be misconfigured, if you fiddle with the options in the Registry (assuming you use MS Windows) or the bios. Intermittent errors are possible then and hard to resolve.

Configuration: If really the cache went empty during burning as you suggested it might just be a configuration problem. Single Speed is 150 kB/s. If you burn at 4X you need to provide a constant stream of 600 kB/s to the drive. With 1 MB of cache you get 1.7 seconds reserve for system-hiccups. Normally you will have two blocks of cache. One on your burner (0.5 MB to 1 MB or even more) and the second on your system, provided by the burning software. If this is really your original problem, it is easy to resolve. Measure the speed of your hardware (many burning programs can do this) and stay within the limits. Do not burn directly from a CD-ROM drive when copying CDs but create a disc-image on your HD. Do not burn over the network. Do not use your PC during burning, etc. But watch out, that the cache going empty during burning can also be a secondary problem caused by a SCSI-bus-lockup for example. Normally you will see an error message or number in this case which might help you with the analysis (or not).

Compatibility: Maverick already spoke about this case. Not every disc brand is optimal for your burner. Check the web for information and experiment. And be aware that at least to my experience one out of 20 new discs might be faulty. You will see this naturally more often, if you burn full CD-ROMs with 650 MB of data and not only a few files.

Non standard burning: If you try to do nonstandard burning, for example mix data and audio-tracks, mix modes, etc. you should know what you do. Otherwise you might get a CD-ROM which is only readable on your burner. One can avoid this, by using a burning software with an assistant (e.g. Nero) which will lead you thru the burning-process by asking clear-text questions.

Aging: Disk-drives and burner age, get dusty lenses, loose laser intensity, get out of alignment, etc. This is a gradual process which documents itself in an increasing rate of sub-surface errors that slow down the CD-ROM as a drive will try to read a block of data several times when the ECC (error correction code) does not suffice to rebuild it. Beside very expensive hardware to check the quality of the burned or mastered CD-ROM there is a inexpensive and very handy software that can help you with those quality-checks. It is ‘CD-R Diagonstic’ by www.cdrom-prod.com. I use it since 1998 on every burned CD-ROM and do not want to miss it.

Erich

I forgot to mention the ‘source with good tips for burning’ you asked for:
Look into the CD-Recordable FAQ http://www.faqs.org/faqs/cdrom/cd-recordable/part1/

[0degree]

Here are some more suggestions:

As Erich pointed out: Don't use your PC during burning. You should stop all running programs by hitting CTRL+ALT+DEL before starting a burn in Win95/98/ME. You should turn off any active screen savers as well.

If you are burning CD's to back up files, I suggest you use burning software that uses packet writing. This way, The CD-R/RW drive can write to a single CD in multiple sessions which almost assures no buffer underruns. One program that does this is Adaptec DirectCD (comes bundled with Easy CD Creator). I'm not too fimiliar with Nero but it should have this capability as well.

Tony.

[teach1st]

I appreciate all the help.

I'm running a Compaq IDE 4X4 with 192 megs of memory, Celeron 700, WinMe.

I get about a 50% success rate with data CD's using either NTI CDMaker 2000 Professional or Adaptec Easy CD Standard. I have better success when I drop one or two files at a time and leave the session open (incremental?). Dropping the speed from 4X to 2X doesn't seem to help. The only error messages I get say the CD couldn't be recorded.

I'm trying some of the suggestions above now.

[Maverick]

If you're getting an error message like "CD could not be recorded" it sounds like a multi-session problem. When burners write the CD, they either leave the disc open for further files to be added or they "finalize" the disc so that no further recording is possible. It's a little like write-protecting on a tape or floppy. So the thing that needs to be asked is if you're getting the errors on new blank CDs or on multi-session CDs that have been burned once already. If it's happening on new blanks then we're no closer to a solution. But if the problem only crops up when adding files to a disc already recorded, then it's easy to solve.

1) Go through the software settings to make sure that multi-session is enabled and that the disc is not being finalized when burned the 1st time.

2) Make sure there's sufficient room on the CD to hold the new files.

[teach1st]

I get the errors on new blank CD's. I'm able to burn a full data CD using multi-session. Seems to me that if I try to burn a full load at once, I get the errors. I'm burning about 1/4 capacity at a time to avoid these errors. My cache has been tweaked - larger than what the "cacheman" program recommends for burning CDs.

[teach1st]

I dl'd Nero and it is a gem...no problems recording data or audio. Thanks! :N