July 14, 2006

Curious George: My CD burns suck!

OK, when I went to the new job, they took Abulafia II, my laptop, away. She had such lines, such athletic grace, like a beach volleyball player... but what she also had was a wicked good CD burner. I replaced her with Barney, a big Labrador Retriever of a PIII desktop - friendly, loyal, but not very bright. And One thing Barney did not have was a CD burner of any kind, much less a good one, and the server one was acting flippy as well. So, I hied myself to the junk shop and picked out a used burner, thinking all I need is something to get by until the worm turns. Installed it, XP caught it right away and loaded the drivers, and I slotted a Roxio basic suite I had kicking around (an old Dell pre-load) and figured I was back on the road to rockin'. But: no. My CDs have such myriad complaints as to render them coasters from the get-go. First, I scotched a dozen disks when burns would hawk up at 50-60% of total. I fiddled the software settings for days, until I *finally* got all the way through a burn - and the CD sounded horrible. It sticks in between tracks, 10-15 seconds of silence until the next song kicks in, several bars into the track. Clicking forward to other songs produces error lights; listen to a song all the way through, and instead of going to the next track it'll jump back to halfway through the track it just played. Some tracks have wavering, where the sound comes in and out, like your listening to it underwater; other tracks simply don't play at all, just silence. What am I doing wrong? And any ideas how to fix it?? Here's as much specs as I can remember: Barney is a Gateway PIII desktop of dubious provenance, a 10 gig hd, 256M of RAM (I think, certainly no less than that), running XP. The Roxio software is a Dell preload of Roxio Basic, with Roxio CD Creator, and Disk Copier, ca. 2002 or so. The software settings I currently have are: 32x speed (down from a max of 48x); "Disk-at-Once" (rather than track at once) and finalize autmoatically; no test; buffer underrun prevention checked. I've tried two types of disks: Imation 48x CD-Rs, and Verbatim "multi-use" CD-Rs. Both give the same sorts of things, virtually indistinguishable from each other. The music is standard mp3s, 20 of them, total data is under the 74 minute line, all songs sound just fine when played off the hd, and I'm doing my burn from the local C drive. Thoughts? Comments? Ideas? Please help me.

posted by Fes 17 years ago
  • Sounds like a duff burner.
  • Have you tried pouring Pepsi in it?
  • Admittedly, I haven't tried Pepsi. Do burners just sometimes not burn very well but otherwise work ok? Because outside of actual burns, it works ok.
  • Balance a penny on the needle arm, that might help. sorry, I've no idea, but I feel your pain.
  • My guess is that it's the hardware. For a while I was using an old PC without a built-in burner, and I got a reconditioned Iomega USB burner for $40 from geeks.com, and although it was on the slow side I never had trouble with the results.
  • I have had horrible luck with some burners just going flaky and stop burning. They would read fine, but not burn for shit. One thing to try would be to make sure that everything running in the background is turned off. Turn off all the little icons down in the lower right hand corner. You might even want to turn off all the fancy XP eye-candy by going to Control Panel -> System -> Advanced -> Performance -> Settings -> Adjust for best performance. It will make it look like Windows NT or 98, but will speed things up a bit. Those will free up some system resources which might help. Ratched down the burn speed. Try to burn it at a very low speed. You also might try to just burn data cds to see if the problem is converting from mp3 (or whatever format you have) to CD audio which can use the processor. Also try to burn just a small amount of data so that there won't be anything that needs to be cached. If it screws up burning, say, just one word document, you can be sure that the burner is crap. If it can burn a cd full of mp3s then converting it to audio is the problem.
  • Second the slow speed suggestion. If that doesn't work then get a new burner.
  • Triple the buring speed, double the shut everything else down. Try not to do anything on the system while buring a CD.
  • OK, I'll try that tonight, let you know how it goes. Followup: I mentioned using Roxio and the IT guy here made a "pfft" face - are there any freeware or cheapware software package out there that you all'd recommend as a replacement?
  • Even if the burner and the CD all say "writable at 48x" or whatnot, I never burn anything faster than 8x. Try burning at progressively slower speeds. If it still craps out as slow as 2x or 4x, then you probably have some bum hardware. And I'd like to reiterate to never, ever do anything when burning a CD that could cause a read/write to the HD (like shutting down background tasks), because some burners are so temperamental that anything that is already accessing the HD when it decides to refill its buffer will throw it into a tizzy. Technically speaking.
  • Agreed on the * slow burn speed * nothing else running And also suspect the hardware. I never had a problem with Roxio (although I'm using Nero now) but I have run into a truckload full of pfft-y faced IT guys, and they have no magic answers. They just read the manual and try different things, that's all. If we all did that, we'd all be dateless antisocial self-hating neurotic jerkoffs. Mm'whay.
  • Monkeyfilter: dateless antisocial self-hating neurotic jerkoffs (Nero has a free trial version for download.)
  • Roxio is not the best, but I think that is mainly because of the interface which is kind of lame and unintuitive. I don't think that technically there is anything wrong with it. However, I do remember that when XP came out it had some problems with Roxio because XP has some basic built in cd burning capabilities which, although based on Roxio, clashed with it. That may have been patched, but since that is an old version of Roxio, it is possible that is a problem. Both musicmatch and winamp can burn audio cds so once you do all the other suggestions, it couldn't hurt to uninstall roxio and try one of those. Nero also has a 30 day trial, i think.
  • I'm a Nero man myself, but on my work machine, I've used BurnAtOnce. some other freeware burners can be found at the Portable Freeware pages.
  • CDBurnerXP Pro is freeware CD/DVD buring software. There's a list of compatible drives here though so far I haven't found any drive it won't work with. As for your problem, sounds like hardware to me. CD-R drives are fragile. Someone pulling one out of a system and selling it used would be unlikely to handle it carefully. And, of course, you've got no way of knowing why it was removed from service in the first place. Before you waste any more time on it, it might be worth trying a new cheapo $30 Lite-On as a replacement and see if that makes any difference. Also, you don't say what your processor speed is, but judging from the other specs on your system, you might just not have enough horsepower to do what you're doing. I second (third?) the idea of turning off absolutely everything you can.
  • 1. Sometimes those OEM installs of applications are written specifically for specific hardware of specificity. If the app encounters something different, it may just punt. 2. The burner may also be toast. If you'd like to fiddle, take it back out of the machine and carefully remove the top. If you can see inside, get a can of compressed air and clean off the laser lens. I don't know how many Cd players and burners I've fixed with this simple trick. Or, if you don't want to rip into it, just open the door and jam the compressed air in and blow ti all around. Yes, this could deposit more dust on the lens. Then again, it coudl dislodge that fist-sized lump off of the laser lens. 3. If speeding the burner up doesn't work, turn it all the way down. Yes, it is painful, but it can produce better burns.
  • On my old pc (PII) i used musicmatch's free software to burn CDs with no problems. One thing to try is to play those burned CDs in more than one player. Sometimes CD players can be temperamental....although i agree with others who say that the h/w is probably the culprit *especially* since it was bought used.
  • Your burner is fucked. So is mine, actually. They don't last long. I have to get a new one on Monday, I've got half the Western world's movie catalogue on here & need to clear some space.
  • I don't mean to advertise, but I've been satisfied with geeks.com who have cd burners <$20 and dvd burners <$40. You should search for the brand/model on Google for complaints before you buy, though.
  • Ha! Tried what you all said: first, turned everything off that was running in the tray, then, burned a data disk (worked fine); then, burned an audio disk, with the only change in settings being that I damped the burn speed from 32x down to 8x. No hitches in the burn itself, tested the disk out in the car stereo this morning: bingo. Worked and sounded great! I'll test again on my office boombox later today, but I think (fingers crossed) I've got a winner. Thanks, everyone!
  • if you need to replace your burner, I've had good luck with Sony DVD burners, and I just retired a Plextor 12x CD burner that I bought new in 2000... not a bad run for any piece of hardware. I disagree with "your system is not up to the challenge", though - I've been burning discs since I put my first burner into a Pentium 166 with 32Mb of RAM, it doesn't take that much heavy lifting.