Buring CDs with Toast Titanium

March 27, 2007 12:23 PM

What exactly does the verification step in Toast Titanium do? Is it an absolutely necessary step when burning a disc? Sometimes the verification fails but it doesn't seem to make any difference whatsoever and the new disc works fine.
posted by Joseppi to computers & internet (5 comments total)

It should read back the whole disc and compare it to the source data. If there's a mismatch, it fails. Your disc that seems to be fine probably has a corrupted file on it somewhere.

I always use verification now, because I had a whole bunch of archive DVDs that were bad in the last 75%, and I never checked that much at burn time. That was a very unpleasant discovery.
posted by smackfu at 12:37 PM on March 27, 2007

It's not a necessary step. Toast is doing just what it claims -- verifying that everything was written correctly by comparing the source vs. what it just wrote. Roxio has an article on the subject.
posted by NucleophilicAttack at 12:38 PM on March 27, 2007

I've noticed that if you burn a disc from files on your hard drive (as opposed to burning from a pre-mastered disc image), it's possible to make verification fail if you move, modify, or delete any of the source files before it's completed.

Toast just compares the files on the disc to the files that you told it to burn; if a file isn't in the same place as when you burned the disc, it will claim that verification failed and eject the disc. But the disc won't have anything wrong with it, the difference was on the other end.

I've had this happen to me a lot when doing backups; it's a little disconcerting, but if you want it to work cleanly, you need to not touch anything while verification is in progress.
posted by Kadin2048 at 1:13 PM on March 27, 2007

If you have access to Nero, I recommend "Nero CD-DVD speed" and the Scan Disc option. I use it after every burn and find it does a good job of quickly telling me if there are any bad sectors on the burn before I go and delete the source files.
posted by snowleopard at 1:26 PM on March 27, 2007

If the data you are writing to disc is important, such as giving a gold master to your customer of their slaved over and fastidiously proofed interactive multimedia presentation for the North American International Auto Show - their labor of love, their "shining moment" in front of their peers, so to speak, including such things as video, sound, and Macromedia Director code so they can present it to management prior to approving the final project for dupllcation and payment, then please start the burn, monitor the Mac carefully through the burn and verification process, and finally insert the disc in another machine for a quick 5 minute test. Let verification finish. Yes, please do.

Otherwise, you may need to have a discussion within the hour of the premature ending of said presentation, with your customer and your boss.

Trust me. 1998 was an interesting year.

But if it's just an MP3 disc for the car? Meh. Skip or cancel it.
posted by disclaimer at 5:47 PM on March 27, 2007