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Tips for burning your music to CDR discs

 

Three main rules: (broken by many - at their own peril)

  • Don't let the bottom of the disc touch anything other than a CD player or the case it came in. I'm amazed at the scratched-up, greasy-fingerprinted premasters that I've seen. Handle CDRs like vinyl records - edges only.
  • Use quality media. In many burners, silver or gold media performs better than dark green. Asian clone brands can cost well under $1.00 per disc, but for 25 to 50 cents more, you can buy the best blanks on the planet. Is your music worth the difference? Even if your burner can sense the medium and recalibrate the laser to match, that's still no excuse to use inferior discs. My favorite? Taiyo Yuden. (Call APDC. 800-522-2732)
  • Paper labels are fine on the copies you make for friends. Leave them off your premaster, because they increase the error rate! You may not hear any degradation on your player, but low error rates are critical to premasters. Label the CDR with magic marker, preferably outside the area where data is written on the bottom of the disc.

Writing discs at higher speeds increases the risk of a buffer underrun. This problem occurs when the computer cannot pass data to the CDR drive quickly enough to keep the drive writing continuously. By definition, a Red Book audio CD has to be written in one continuous pass. The slightest interruption in the flow of data to the CD will produce a coaster. Here are some items to look at if you have a problem:

  • Make sure you have enough memory. Many recording/editing/burning programs are specified to work with 16 or 32mB of RAM. 64mB is a more realistic minimum. More is better.
  • 80 minute discs are not as reliable to read or write as the standard 74 minute CDRs are.
  • Make sure that at least 10% of the capacity is always free on the hard drive that you use for storing mixes. The drive has to work much harder if it has to pack data into small left-over sections of disk space.

 

  • Defragment your disk drives often. I use two large "working" drives, and eight others for archival storage. When a working drive fills up with mastered projects, I transfer the projects to an archive drive, then I erase the working drive and defragment it. (This takes only a couple of seconds.) Now the data can flow onto and off of the drive in large contiguous blocks, and the chances of interruptions in the data stream decrease.
  • Log off your network. If there is any chance that someone else can access your machine through a Local Area Network, make sure to disable that option. One manufacturer goes so far as to recommend unplugging the network cable and rebooting, so that the network card is not accessing the data bus looking for network traffic.
  • If you have a SCSI CD writer, make sure it is terminated properly. The manufacturer's documentation should have clear instructions for checking this. Many controllers can terminate the controller end of the SCSI cable automatically, but its always worth checking.
  • While you are at it, check that you have the latest versions of drivers for the SCSI controller, and firmware for the SCSI CD writer. These can usually be found at the manufacturer's web site, or you can call their tech support line.
  • Burn CDR discs from a hard disk image, rather than on the fly. Most CD burning programs allow you to adjust the levels of individual tracks, dither the fades and crossfades, then burn the CD immediately. This is convenient, but it demands that you have enough CPU and memory capacity to do the job in real time, while the CD is being burned. If you experience problems, select the option of creating a CD image. This intermediate step will perform all the computation for levels and fades off-line, then write the image to hard disk. (You will need enough spare hard disk space to store all the data that will be written to the final CDR.) As the final step, burn that hard disk image to CDR. The computer now has less work to do, and music data will flow more smoothly to the CDR drive.
  • This principle also applies to making copies of CDs. Reliability will increase if you read the source CD onto hard disk as an image, then burn the image to CDR in one pass. The hard drive supplying the music data is much faster than the fastest CD reader, so error rates will drop.
  • Windows only: (thought the principles apply to Macs)
    • Log off the Internet. Don't multitask. Close all applications other than the software that burns the disc. To check your situation, try the "three fingered salute," (CTRL-ALT-DELETE). This will display all the programs that are using resources. Anything other than EXPLORER and SYSTRAY may be unnecessary to the burn. Consider removing schedulers, alarm clocks, pop-up messagers and resource monitors such as Norton Utilities. These can unexpectedly take control of the system data bus, creating a glitch on the CDR.

 

 

    • The "Sleep" and "Screensave" modes on some PCs can be quirky. If you burn a long CD, some machines will try to enter standby mode after a predetermined length of time. This shouldn't happen at all, but is worth a look if you are tracking an elusive problem. This type of problem can also happen when older ISA-standard SCSI controllers are mated with newer motherboards containing only one ISA slot. PCI bus controllers have fewer problems. Try disabling the Sleep and Screensaver options, both in BIOS settings and in Windows itself.
    • Configure your machine as a network file server. Go to My Computer/Control Panel/System/Performance/File System. Most PCs work fine when set to the normal DESKTOP COMPUTER. If you are experiencing problems, choose NETWORK FILE SERVER. This gives priority to disk activity over screen activity. You might notice an occasional hesitation when the screen redraws, but that is a good tradeoff - the computer is making sure that music data is flowing smoothly.
    • Disable auto insert notification. Go to My Computer/Control Panel/System/Device Manager. Double click the CDROM icon. Highlight the CDROM that is installed in your computer and click the SETTINGS tab. Uncheck the AUTO INSERT NOTIFICATION box. Now the machine will stop needlessly interrogating the CD drive every two seconds, wondering if the disc was changed.

 

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