Writing audio CD
 

New Desktop PC, Win7Pro 64bit, Samsung SH224DH writer. Cannot produce an audio CD-R that will play in my hifi. CD burned with finalise as an audio disk at 16x and I have produced several coasters using different burning progs. It will play in the car drive and has all the .cda files on it. Copied files to lappie (also Win7Pro) and in 2 minutes via WMP I had a working audio CD-R. Where do I look for problems on the desktop?

You may not have to look there. Some older CD players just cannot play CD-Rs.

Oops, posted too soon. Should read complete post first......

How old is the stereo CD player? Older players were only designed to read pressed CDs which have a higher reflectivity. Perhaps your new burner at 16x isn't doing a good enough of a job at creating dark spots on the CD-R for your CD player to read it? Try burning as slow as possible or just don't use it.

As you can see from post 1, stereo reads CD-R fine. In the absence of ANY tech info I can find I appear to be stuck with a 16x min speed. As far as I can see the Laptop (in WMP) writes at the 'fastest' speed and the LG80N fitted states 24x max CD writing, so no joy there!

One odd thing - Device Manager states the Samsung is 'scsi' when I believe it is SATA.

Just because it can read some doesn't mean it can read all! Different burners do better or worse jobs.

As to the SCSI thing it's possibly related to RAID - it's not saying the drive is physically a SCSI device just that it's using SCSI protocols. I don't think it makes any difference.

- "using different burning progs" - 5 in all including WMP (hence the coasters)

RAID not active

I don't mean the software, I mean the actual physical device. If the laser isn't creating a big enough and dark enough spot in the dye layer your CD player won't read it.

From what I've read RAID capability can be enough.

Increase your chances of writing & reading accurately by burning at a slower speed (e.g. Nero Drivespeed) and by cleaning the lenses.

My 1991 Meridian CD transport won't read 80 minute CDs, ever, at all - but that's an age related issue. It has no problem with 74 minute CD-Rs, but won't read CD-RWs. My car CD players read 80 minute CD-Rs - I don't think I've tried a CD-RW in them.

I have found CD / DVD burners to be of variable quality, so all of my desktops were built with 2, from different manufacturers, to increase the chances of writing and reading correctly.

SD

Got you, Ping. What does "From what I've read RAID capability can be enough. " mean?

Saab - these are the first CD's the drive has burned so I can't see a dirty lens being an issue. It would be nice to be able to see the setup of the drive somehow, but I cannot find any tech on it as I said. The drive does not appear to exist on the Samsung site. The CDs are 80 mins but my deck will read them.

CD-RW is a known issue for decks.

I thought drivespeed was for read speed?

If your motherboard has RAID hardware then drivers get installed and apparently for some chipsets this causes Windows to use SCSI regardless of RAID being used or not.

I think Saab is meaning cleaning the lens of the CD player as well - they can develop a nice film over the years.

No, it applies to both reading and writing - the slower the burn speed the longer the laser has to make its mark. i.e. the slower the better.

Ta for all that. All the drivespeed documantation talks of read speed, but I downloaded it and installed it and..........it cannot find a CD-ROM drive.............:confused:

My new HP laptop wouldn't play DVD's - until "my man wot does" did "something" to the inside. No idea what, so no use to this thread, but just supports my oft heard cry of "WTF do THEY have to change everything ?"

Apologies BOAC, I didn't catch that by "drivespeed" you were meaning some software and not "drive speed" as in speed of the drive. You're right, DriveSpeed only affects read speed.

BOAC, apologies, you are right - DriveSpeed doesn't affect write speed. I could have sworn it did.

It can be a bit odd to configure - it has to start when you log on to detect the drive(s).

It's useful in keeping the read speed down in Win 7 when playing audio CDs so that it doesn't spin the drive to the max on playback and drown out the music! This is a "feature" of Win 7 that I raised with MS back in 2011, and they eventually corrected it - at least for pressed CDs, but CD-Rs still want to play at 54X.

Yes, I meant cleaning the player lens.

SD

Re SCSI, recent Intel drivers report SCSI for everything now, partly because nothing uses that info. Although I think that is not completely accurate, but close enough.

Have you tried different media? Some drives simply burn better with certain media. If you really want to faff around there are utiliies which dump the drive's burning profiles. If you use a CD which isn't listed, the drive either does a quick test or makes a guess. If you media is off-brand, the media may ID itself as a popular brand it performs similarly to. The problem is, cheap stuff may be mis-ID'd.

Thanks, Bush - I have chased my tail here and failed miserably so far, so I think I'll just have to give up and use the lappie to burn audio. I have checked with TSST corp and the firmware is correct. Disk is TDK CD-R80 (or so it says). Just appears to be an incompat between my CDplayer and the DVD/CD drive. I will eventually try with a different brand and i have yet to burn a DVD in the drive.

Any links to the utilities you mention please?

Plextor Professional XL, Opti Drive Control and Nero CD-DVD Speed Control are all the same basic package by Eric Deppe. They've not been updated in several years. ODC isn't free. Nero won't work on Windows 7 or higher without faffing around. Plextor is now free. It works fine for me, but it doesn't work for others. You can get all the products from their respective web sites. Thinking back, I've not burnt a CD or DVD for a couple of years.


Anyway, the Plextor stuff will tell you all about the drive, the media you're using, and the quality of the burn though you may need the help of a rocket scientist to interpret the results.


(Also drifting threadily for a moment, for anyone using ImgBurn: the latest version now uses Candy as its malware provider of choice in the installer. It's not obvious how to decline the added goodies. When you do find the right checkbox, it ignores your selection and installs anyway. Luckily, Trend will block the install. So ImgBurn has gone from a must-have to a run-away.)

OK - thnaks for the post. Ran Plextor and cannot see any problems so I guess it must be an incompat with the player. What does 'Lock Channels' on a CD mean?

L and R audio channels are locked together so you aren't changing their volumes separately?

I can only guess what you're looking at, but generally locking the left and right volume sliders together.