What is the technical reason why people suggest burning audio CD's at only 1x in a computer CDR?

stu

Stability and quality.

If you take into consideration that any read/write device has errors at speed n, as soon as you start going faster than n, you're more likely to make more errors.

The specific reason why it's unwise to burn faster than 4x (not 1x ... that's for the older days and older computers) is because the system bus and buffers couldn't handle the data transfer fast enough to "feed the need" of the burner (buffer underrun). Other cases showed that there was TOO much data going to the burner and it would cause buffer OVERRUN.

Chris

Don't know what all the fuss is about......i have been burning all my cd's at 8x and never had a problem.
My car cd player, home cd player and my cmx-5000 all read them without a problem.

basically put, it has to do with available memory in the system.. burning from mp3 directly onto a cd takes up considerably more system RAM and processor usage because it is comverting the file to wav on-the-fly... another thing to consider is that a lot of people run other utilities in the background while the cd-r is burning, such as firewalls, antivirus programs, web sites, etc.. all of this should be closed out if you are using an IDE burner..

even though it takes a while to do, you should ALWAYS convert your mp3's to wav before you burn the cd, because the burner program is just taking the info from the hard drive and putting it directly onto the cd with little-to-no conversion at all, which will NEVER give you an overrun or underrun so long as burning the cd is the only task you are performing at that particular moment in time, because according to the software and the drive, the audio is still just plain-old data.. scsi drives only problems with this stuff would be the direct from mp3 burning to cd's, as that still takes up the same amount of ram and processor speed.

i just get so many questions on cd-rw drives its not even funny.. most people still don't know how to do this simple task.. yay.

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PS! pulse - you could be correct about overruns occurring every once in a while on certain systems (dont know about macs at all), but those are only going to occur on systems that are not cinfugured properly... cache settings have a lot to do with this, and win98/me are notoriously sh!tty memory managig OS'es..

[This message has been edited by onethirty6bpm (edited 01-17-2001).]

136 - I've seen it happen bcz. of software!

It is possible to burn at 16x on a P2-333 with 128MB of RAM, BUT I don't reccomend it. It's unstable at best!

Simply put, go with higher speeds for less reliable results. You can burn on most systems at 4x and be confident you'll be able to read the disc.

Chris

Oh, I thought that there was a problem with audio CD players reading a high speed burnt CDR
If its just about computer processing power and the ability to keep up, then don't worry guys.... I use a G3

thanks for the replies so far.

stu

[This message has been edited by Stuart (edited 01-18-2001).]

I have yet to see what the big fuss is about burning at 16x. As long as your burner has at least a 1 meg cache (16x burners come with at least 2 megs) and you have RAM (even 64 MB is enough), you shouldn't have problems unless the hard drive is seriously failing or you're reading a CD-ROM with a lot of small files (copying a disc to the hard drive is the best way since some CD-ROMs are notoriously slow at extracted digital audio or seeking).

However, consider even the crappiest ATA drives on the planet can dish out a constant 3 MB/sec, which is more than the requirement for burning a CD-R at 16x (for the uneducated, X is a multiple of the speed of an original CD reader: 150 K/sec, so hence 16 x 150K = 2400K or just over 2.3 megs/sec ). If anything is to blame for underruns, I wouldn't look any further than the hard drive (provided everything else was plugged in, etc).

In fact, I burnt a rewritable disc from my Mac LCIII's hard drive awhile back at 4x. For those who don't know, this 1993 LCIII has a whopping 25 MHz Motorolla 68030 (68K baby!) processor and had 18 megs of RAM at the time (I have since stolen the RAM to use in my Akai Remix 16 ) I have yet to have a problem reading that disc; the disc was written flawlessly. If I had the hard drive space, I'm sure I could burn an audio CD @ 6x in my trusty LC. The Yamaha burner has a 2 meg cache (which I think is a big key to solving underrun problems).

On a modern system tip, a Mac G4 has been known to handle 3 DV streams from three different video cameras at once and not drop a frame. This is definately bandwidth my friends!

--
Dave

[This message has been edited by SpinThis! (edited 01-18-2001).]

One word answer to all your wonderful DV abilities: Mac.

I love mac for multimedia work - and nothing else.

Chris

Yep the gold old Mac, my G3 has been fitted with a 3 digital component video stream capture board (Avid) and can handle 3 streams at 50 megabits or 2 streams at 100 megabits (HDTV digital editing). I burn CD's with a professional burner, wich has 4 MB of buffer and works on scsi. I could infact burn at 8x speed with my CDJ100s players reading it perfect, my car CD player (also pioneer!) and my discman to. The error meter program i've got gives 2 to 1 decrease in BLER and ERROR CORRECTION status when 8x is compared to 1x. So to minimize risk of data or audio getting defect i burn most serious stuff at 1 speed. If i need a work copy of a CD i burn at 4 speed, wich still gives 10% more BLER and 17% more ERROR CORRECTION then 1x. I use various brands of CDR's mainly A-brands

Plus: one other good reason when you record faster than the 1x speed and try playing it in a Non Comercial CD player say on your Home unit the CD will skip and jump all over the place

the reason for this is all Domestic CD players only Operate at a Speed of 1x - sometimes they can read a 2x CDR burn but other times you can play Frizzbies with them

best way to check with the Technical specs on the CD player unit you wish to use and see what Speeds they can play at..

Just my 3c worth (inflation)

I believe no one has yet posted the fact that there is a physical difference between disks burned at a different speed. It depends on the choice of media as well as on the drive. I even know about this Yamaha CDRW drive where the engineers disabled the 1x burn function because it was 'unstable'...

Basic rule of thumb is: the better your drive and media and the lower the speed you burn on, the better the result.

Dj make : People who have a 4x burner with 1mb cache probably get better results using the 1x.
People with a 8-16x burner with 4mb cache probably get better results burning at 4x or something, because the burner is built to burn fast not the slowest you can go, pluss the newest burners have alot bigger memory/cache/buffer whatever!.
The quality of the burned cd offcourse depends on you hardware, like cpu and ram etc. And of what recording software you use.

Dennis: remember recording speed is independent of playback speed; this means no matter what speed burned the disc, it can be played back on any recorder that supports the given format (in audio CDs, the format is CD-A). It's just like 2x dubbing on your old tape deck.

Most high-speed burners I've seen have done an exceptional job at keeping all the data intact, even at high speeds. To me, if anyone is is still burning at 1X speed, they obviously have an extra 45 minutes they can sit and wait for the disc to finish.

--
Dave

[This message has been edited by SpinThis! (edited 01-25-2001).]