HELP !! (Poor quality playback with CDRW)

[rocky7]

Hi, new here and your help would be much appreciated.

My friend has asked me to burn some music CD's for her birthday party tonight. I have put together playlists in Windows Media Player and last night I began burning these playslists to TDK CD-RW 700MB (80min) 4x 12x High Speed CD's.

After burning the six CD's needed I tried to play them back to be sure all was well. I found that the first 3-4 tracks were fine and after that the quality dropped significantly. The tracks were jumping and the quality was generally very poor.

I then made sure the settings were on the highest quality and slow burning speed and tried again. Unfortunately the same problem occured.

I have burn't music CD's before I not had this problem.

In a bit of a panic now as I need these CD's tonight.

What am I doing wrong ???.

[fiveportions]

I've had the same. And I've also been VERY HAPPY with party CD's at home only to find they won't play on the host's cd-r compatible system.
It would be useful if possible to check with the host of the party how their system likes CD-R's (if at all).

TIPS:

MEDIA: Use branded media like Verbatim or TDK rather than Infiniti or other budget brands (I'm only going from experience here). Yes - I see you're using TDK already, BUT DON'T USE CDRW'S - GET SOME CD-R's! Confusingly, best QUALITY does not always equal best COMPATABILITY; my fussy CD player won't play Taiyo Yuden (allegedly the best quality cd-r's available).

RECORDING LENGTH: Don't go over 74 mins recording on any one disc. No point in squeezing-in a 103 min recording of top tunes if the disc don't play. CD-R's were only designed to hold 74 mins of audio data and any more DOES confuse some domestic players. This is from experience.

EXTRACTION: Use EAC (Exact Audio Copy) -it's free to download and a breeze to use. I extract to WAV files which are saved where you want on your hard-drive, ready to be burned by your burning app. EAC recognises any errors and automatically re-reads the dodgy spot to get a sound read.

Burn as DAO 'Disc-At-Once', not 'On The Fly'.

SPEED: Audio buffs generally burn at 4X. I burn at 8X as a compromise.

So if I were you, I'd go down the shops, get a selection of the cheapest Verbatim etc. CD-R's, download EAC and give it another go at low speed.

To test, listen to the LAST track on the CD -it will be on the outer edge of the disc which is spinning past the laser much faster than the inner part of the CD so is more likely to produce errors.

I'm not an expert but I think this is all well-founded advice. In my case it was definitely the media letting me down.

GOOD LUCK - PARTY-ON!

[rocky7]

Thanks for that - much appreciated.

I am finding that when I play back - the first 5-6 tracks are fine and then the quality just deteoriates.

I don't think it is the media because I took a track which sounded poor quality and burnt this on it's own to the same CD and it was fine - presumably because it was the only on the CD.

It is puzzling - and I am running out of time !!

[fiveportions]

For the first track to sound fine is typical of a media problem. If you burned the same track 15 times however and tried listening to the 15th track, it would sound awful.

If you are using CD-RW media, I would say that is almost certainly your problem. The fact that the first tracks sound OK but get progressively worse does suggest that the media just isn't reflective enough for the reader to keep-up after the speed increases.

CD-RWs are much less reflective than CD-R's. it's like your CD player trying to read a paper in the dark wearing shades!

[rocky7]

Thats for all the info. I have now managed to burn using NERO but only with unused CDRW - using old erased caused the same problem. Managed to do 1 of 6 ok - just hope the others will be ok. Got 3hrs to finish and check !!.

[CDR-Zone.COM]