Re: CD Burning? media and burner questions

"Eric B" wrote ...
I am planning to burn a number of CDs and want to make sure they are
done right. Is there a compelling reason to have them commercially
burned rather than making them at home.

If you need copies fast, or if $$ is no object, or if you need too
many copies to burn yourself, or if you need fancy printing and/
or packaging, send it out.

I have used many types of CD
media and have given up on cheapies.

I use exclusively the top-rated brand (Taiyo-Yuden).
The cost literally only a few pennies more than the cheapies,
and they are extremely reliable. I've burned likely over 1000
CDR and DVDR discs without a single return from a customer
who couldn't play it. The tiny extra cost is more than worth the
hassle dealing with returns.

Note that many brands available on retail shelves are only
"marketing labels" by companies who have never made a
single disk. THey OEM discs from the cheapest vendor
and you have no idea what you are getting from month to
month. Might be great, and might be junk. T-Y makes their
own product and you can depend on getting the good stuff.

There are some burning programs and disk utilities that will
read and display the molded-in manufacturer's code. But
note that some junk disks have counterfeit codes from
reputable companies.

Are commercial blanks any
different than than the writable CDs available in 100s.

Not really. Perhaps the commercial operations have run the
eperiments to see which brands/types produce best results
with their equipment.

I have
occasionally run into playback machines that won't recognize my 1 off
copies. Do I need to buy CDA blanks or is there CD authoring code that
I am missing?

No. CDA blanks are only different in two ways: They have a code
molded into the disk which confirms that you have paid the extra
taxes (which assume you are making illegal copies of copyright
content). And CDA blanks may be optimized for lower writing
speeds. CDA audio recorders record at 1x and you likely can't
buy standard CDR data disks that will write at that speed anymore.

My question is more about the burners. What makes a CD burner good? Is
the one in my Mac Book OK? Is the one in the Alesis Masterlink any
better. Are commercial burners better? If so how so? I have access to
a printer/ burner, I forget the brand, but I know it is quirky to
use.

You would likey see a bigger difference between burning at
lower speds (vs. the max possible speed) than between different
brands/models of hardware.

Obviously, for thousands I want someone else to do it. I am talking
about a run of 50 or so, but I want the quality to be as good as
possible. I will appreciate any knowledgeable advice or the subject.

Whether I'm burning audio or video discs, the same rules work for
me: Use the highest-quality dsiscs (Taiyo-Yuden). Buy them from
a reliable dealer to avoid counterfeits (SuperMediaStore works for
me). Burn at the lowest practical speed to maximize contrast in
the burned image. (10-12x for audio, and 4-6x for video works
for me).

There is much info out on the internet about burning discs (both
audio and video). About optimizing burning contrast, about
measuring error rates, etc. etc. About which drive brands and
models are best, etc. I have found these valuable...
http://www.digitalfaq.com/media/dvdmedia.htm
http://www.digitalfaq.com/dvdguides/buyerguides/buymedia.htm
I have found that the same source of reliable DVDRs (namely
Taiyo-Yuden) also makes the most reliable CDRs.

It's all about the music!
Eric Blackmer
PS Happy Solstice Celebration of your choice!!

Merry Christmas.


.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Problem burning music CDs
    ... audio as a fully expanded audio file on a data CD somewhere ... Set the record speed lower and use cached files on your hard disk. ... Matthew H. Fields http://www.umich.edu/~fields ...
    (rec.music.classical)
  • Re: The Future of Server Hardware?
    ... same type of disk array interfaces? ... Processors and on-chip cache are extremely expensive and silly-fast. ... Within the memory hierarchy in an Itanium, for instance, the processor stalls when data is not available. ... EV7 went for much smaller caches because the EV7 design had a much faster off-chip connection to memory - EV7 main memory speeds were faster than EV68 level 1 cache accesses. ...
    (comp.os.vms)
  • Re: "RIP" not as in rest in peace!!
    ... The data on a hard drive is truly random access and because of that it can ... That's why we have things like disk defragmenters. ... a file system in place that requires that the entire partition on the hard ... audio is nothing like the data structures that are stored on a hard drive. ...
    (rec.audio.tech)
  • Re: Ever-more multitrack questions
    ... disk from your 744T. ... You can use your laptop's burning software to Burn a DVD or CD directly from ... Since the 744T will also mirror to CF card and HD simultaneously, ...
    (rec.arts.movies.production.sound)
  • Re: 8-STABLE Slow Write Speeds on ESXI 4.0
    ... Write speeds went up to 40MBish. ... order to offload as much IO to the controller (in this case vmware) as ... and for the Guest OS's hard disk driver use the LSI SATA/SAS ... Workstation) emulates an Intel ICH2. ...
    (freebsd-stable)