Need a very reliable cd burner for audio cd burning

September 29, 2005 12:12 AM

Need a reliable cd burner to burn audio cds for radio show.

I recently have a radio show on college radio and i need to burn audio cds (from mp3s). The worst thing that has happened (a lot so far) is that my burner sucks and the cd's i have burned dont play/ are corrupted / skip. Mostly...they just dont play and i get owned. I am using Nero, which i do not suspect to be a problem. I am using these generic brand of cd-r's from a company called "prism"...but i dont think the media is a problem either as the person who has a show before me uses the exact same brand and has had no problem with his burned cd's. My friend burned me an audio cd from his burner as well using this media and it worked fine.

Further complications to this is the fact that I used cd check "http://www.elpros.si/CDCheck/" to check the cds for readability. so far like 10 out of 12 of my cds have some corruption (very bad). Further more, i played a cd that had a certain track corrupted but i didnt play the corrupted track (track 13 on this cd was bad, but i played track 5)...still didnt work out. This other cd i burned that had no errors according to cd check (one of the few), actually played fine, but a few of the tracks skipped. To make matters worse, it is very hard to check whether these audio cds will work in the station or not because computer drives seem to be able to read this semi-corrupted audio fine.

I really need a burner that will burn audio cds reliably. I don't know which drive is particularly reliable and was hoping for suggestions. I did some price checking and actually found that a lot of dvd-/+r drives are around the same priceas the cd-rw/dvd drives. I know that most dvd-r drives can also burn cds so it doesnt matter if it is a dvd burner either. As long as it is reliable, burns 40x or faster and is decently priced. Some of the newer drives have all this error detection technology; that sounds nice too. One last note is that i'm on a laptop, so usb 2.0 external or a suggestion for a good external enclosure would really help :).

posted by EvilKenji to computers & internet (7 comments total)

Reliability goes up as the burn speed goes down. Burn your masters at 1x, if at all possible.
posted by Rothko at 12:40 AM on September 29, 2005

Most CD burners on the market are surely good enough, with a nice slow burn as Rothko mentioned.

I have the cheapest CD burner around, a `Lite-On' 52 x burner. I've burned something in the order of 3,000 CDs with never a single bad burn.

I also recommend using Nero to burn, with the data verification option turned on.
posted by tomble at 5:41 AM on September 29, 2005

Plextor! Despite the stupid name, considered industry standard for quality by many (including myself). Been using my current one for about two years, which replaced my older model Plextor I'd been running for about three years. I have never burned a CD that wouldn't play or that skipped or any of that junk.
posted by Who_Am_I at 6:02 AM on September 29, 2005

I do the same thing for my radio show using the same crappy OEM cd-rw that Dell saw fit to include with my completely average 2001-era Optiplex using Gentoo and Xcdroast and cheap-ass Staples-branded media without a problem. I do burn at 16x instead of 1x as it is a nice compromise between time (I usually finish my mix with less than 30 minutes to burn and pedal to the studio) and reliability.

I would suggest trying the slow burn first and if that doesn't work I imagine any replacement drive you come up with would.
posted by Suck Poppet at 8:04 AM on September 29, 2005

Yep, Plextor's the best. If you still don't get good burns with a Plextor, use better media. Taiyo Yuden is very good. They're the guys that practically invented the CD-R, and are the only ones that make their discs in Japan. If you're CD shopping at a retail store, if you see a "Made in Japan" on the cakebox, you know you've got TYs. MAM-A (Mitsui Advanced Media - America) is probably the best, but comes at a price.
posted by zsazsa at 9:43 AM on September 29, 2005

In my IT department here, all the gearheads (myself included) swear by LG drives. They are cheap when bought as OEMs and are widely considered to be fast, reliable and versatile little drives.

For the price, you might as well get a unit that can do DVD as well. Most drives in the LG line support DVD +/- R/RW DVD-RAM and DVD-DL as well as all the flavours of CD-R/W.
posted by WinnipegDragon at 10:25 AM on September 29, 2005

I release cdrs & use a Plextor and Taiyo Yudens. Only.

Before I switched to the TYs I occasionally had reports of errors (which I replaced free of course). Since the switch? Nada. I pay a little more here (seoul) for the TYs but it's worth it to not get those emails & wonder how many people had problems but didn't bother to email.
posted by Joseph Gurl at 9:09 PM on September 30, 2005