Audio CD-R

mordeith

Hey all.
Recently in a rush to get some CD-Rs I accidentally bought ones that are designed for Audio only. I tried them out anyway and burnt a CD with various tunes on it. However when I played it back on my stereo the sound was perfect for the first minute or so but then there's a constant hiss throughout the rest of the music. Are these CDs incompatible with PC burning or is there some other reason why the sound is screwed?

garthv

What speed di you burn them at?

snappieT

From another forum:

Because of recent copyright law (perhaps the Digital Millenium Copyright Act? Did I get the name right?), blank music CDs must have a small program or program-like info embedded on the blank disc. If your recording device doesn't detect this program, it won't record to the blank disc. This is supposedly to ensure that record companies get a share of the profits from sales of blank discs to make up for the royalties that will be lost from the copying being done by consumers. Apparently this happens between the manufacturer of the discs and the record companies before the disc is actually sold.

How I found out is as follows:
I bought a stand-alone video CD recorder to preserve some old VHS tapes on disc. It worked just fine until I used up all ten of the blank discs that were provided with the recorder. Then I tried to use one of the economy data CDs that I normally use to copy CDs and LPs on my computer (and they've been working fine for that purpose).

I thought I had copied the tape, but there was nothing there. When I called tech support at the company that made the VCD recorder, I was told about this difference. I bought some one of the brands of music CDs they suggested and tried again, and they were right. I was again recording with no problem.

It doesn't make sense that this would apply only to this specific device. Has anyone else run across this situation?

And why doesn't it apply when copying CDs using Windows Media Player? If this were a requirement, I'm sure it would be included in WMP. The recordings that I've made on my computer using the data discs seem to play just fine in my other CD players, except for Toshiba DVD/CD player, but that might be because it is about four, maybe five years old now. But they also play just fine in the portable "boom box" that is over ten years old.

mordeith

GaRtH_V wrote:

What speed di you burn them at?

I think it was 40x or 48x. Do you reckon it's too fast?

As for the legalise above, I've never come across that before. Still there might be something in it.

garthv

Yeh ive found if you burn audio cd's at high speeds you get a constant hissing/popping noise in most cd players. This is why I burn all my audio cd's at 16x and ive never had that problem again.

Adam

You probably had perfect sound for the first minute because it takes time for the burner to get up to top speed, and once it passed a certain threshold you lost quality in the burning process because it became too fast.

Just try it again at a slower speed, 16X as GaRtH_V suggested and it should be fine.

Hope that helps!

ftg

sceptre

snapscan1212p wrote:

From another forum:

That should only apply to recordings made on standalone recorders though.

Personally I still tend to copy audio discs at a pitiful 4x. If I copy at 16x I run a data check after which makes the wait about the same. I've almost never had any problems with that apart from the wait (exceptions below).

Having said that I had problems copying two discs made by well known artists (one sampled by Eminem, the other currently featured in a new very bad and annoying McDonald's advert) which gave results similar to that experienced by mordeith - the discs weren't officially copy protected but they wouldn't copy properly at any speed using Nero, EZCD or any of the usual programs at any speed - some of the disc would be fine but some tracks were mostly buzzing and dramatically failed the compare to original data tests. Had to use Padus Discjuggler, worked a treat.

mordeith

Thanks for all the help guys. I'll try the slower speeds and see what happens.