How do I burn music onto a 90-minute CD?

February 19, 2007 4:53 PM

How do I burn music onto a 90-minute CD?

When I load a blank Aterra 90-min/800 MB into my laptop, it says I have only 80 minutes of space. I'm guessing this is a driver problem (Acer Slimtype S0SW-833S) , but I can't find any info on how I can either update the driver or force it to overburn. Is there software out there to solve my problem? Can I ever use these CDs in conjunction with Itunes? Is there a CD burner on the market - perhaps an external drive if necessary - that allows me to burn 90 minute CDs?

posted by sixpack to computers & internet (4 comments total)

Phaedon - why be a tool? You obviously looked it up, so would it have been too hard to just copy and paste that answer here?

The text in question:

"Hurry and jump from the 80 minute frying pan into the 90 minute fire. The maximum capacity of a disc that fully conforms to the Philips/Sony Orange Book standard is 74 minutes. Higher capacities require a forgiving write or read drive. Some drives tolerate defects but many do not."
posted by bcnarc at 5:51 PM on February 19, 2007

I think you need a drive and burning software that support 'overburning'. I don't believe there is an actual CD standard for anything beyond 80 minutes. Nero should be capable of this. In the preferences, you should be able to 'allow overburn' or the like. If your drive also supports it, it should just work. Otherwise, you'll get an error message when it tries to write beyond the 80 minute mark.
posted by xiojason at 7:39 PM on February 19, 2007

Here's a nice (and old! 2002) article at Tom's Hardware about overburning.

Here's a (possibly way out-of-date) chart showing the overburn capability of a variety of CD-R drives.
posted by xiojason at 7:42 PM on February 19, 2007

You'll need a drive and burning software that support overburn. The tricky part is going to be determining just how much overburn your CD has. It might say 90 minutes, (I've seen 99 minute CDRs) but that's probably playing loose with the numbers, since anything over 74 minutes is technically out-of-spec as it stands. There might be new-fangled ways to test for overburn capacity, but the way we used to do it in the old days was to manually set the disc length in the overburn settings in Nero, then test it, then increase it a little more, then test it, then increase it a little more... until finally it would produce a bad burn.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 12:20 AM on February 20, 2007