Audio Cd Burning Problems. Help!
 

I am a newbie. I recently purchased a Formac 24x10x40 Cdr-drive. The problem is it takes 20 minutes or more to burn a 45 minute audio cd. That's cd to cd. Is that normal? Can I reduced the burn time?

It takes only 3 minutes to burn from hard drive to cd, but it requires extracting the songs which takes about 15 minutes. Can this be done quicker?

Specs: G4 Cube 450mhz w/dvd rom drive, 1 gig of ram, 20 gig hard drive, Firewire 2.7, OS 9.1, and Toast Lite 5.0.2.

Is there something wrong with the drive? Drivers need to be update? Should try Toast Titanium?

Any feedback would be appreciate?

Hi Meerteen,

I'm pretty confident of what it could be.

You say you're copying disc-to-disc? Well, most likely the drive you're copying FROM can only perform digital audio extraction (DAE), at 2x speed - it copies music twice as fast as an audio cd player plays it. Single speed is 150k/sec, hence you can only rip at 300k/sec with your source drive which is pretty paultry by today's standards.

Some older drives have a hard time extracting music data at a decent rate, hence your writing software is telling your writer to slow down and wait for the source to catch up. Also, have you tried other audio cd's? See, your source drive will slow down if it finds a dud disc.

Alas there is an easy solution.

Just insert the audio cd in your writer and copy from that drive to an image file. Do a test copy. You should be able to rip audio at a speed of at least 10x and burn at whatever speed you want; the quality of the ripped music will not deteriorate at all despite the higher DAE speed: it's digital data.

When reading from your writer, you're creating a cd image file that is stored on your hard drive and simply burned from. It's much safer than disc-to-disc copying, especially where dirty or scratched discs are concerned and you can make as many copies as you like.

Hope this helps. All the best.

Hi Meerteen,

I'm pretty confident of what it could be.

You say you're copying disc-to-disc? Well, most likely the drive you're copying FROM can only perform digital audio extraction (DAE), at 2x speed - it copies music twice as fast as an audio cd player plays it. Single speed is 150k/sec, hence you can only rip at 300k/sec with your source drive which is pretty paultry by today's standards.

Some older drives have a hard time extracting music data at a decent rate, hence your writing software is telling your writer to slow down and wait for the source to catch up. Also, have you tried other audio cd's? See, your source drive will slow down if it finds a dud disc.

Alas there is an easy solution.

Just insert the audio cd in your writer and copy from that drive to an image file. Do a test copy. You should be able to rip audio at a speed of at least 10x and burn at whatever speed you want; the quality of the ripped music will not deteriorate at all despite the higher DAE speed: it's digital data.

When reading from your writer, you're creating a cd image file that is stored on your hard drive and simply burned from. It's much safer than disc-to-disc copying, especially where dirty or scratched discs are concerned and you can make as many copies as you like.

Hope this helps. All the best.

Sorry for the double post - server playing up.. :-)

Thanks for your feedback. Much appreciated.