Problems burning CDs

[Stuckin98]

One of my 98se computers stays off line since its primary purpose is to burn music. I had the unofficial updates on it. Seemed to work fine. Later I started to get dropouts on the CDs I burnt for the player in the living room, so I saved the music to my storage drive and erased the system drive. I reinstalled 98se and left out the updates except for nusb33 to activate the USB ports. I also found a brand new TEAC burner (2004), in it's original box which was factory sealed. Even after making these changes, I still get dropouts on my discs so I don't think the unofficial updates caused the problem.

My computer saavy neighbor suggested making ISO discs for a smoother burn since the computer doesn't have to keep running back and forth to access files. I'm confused because I made good burns before without doing that. I don't know much about the ISO thing so I have to study up on it. Another possibility might be unnecessary programs that are running in the background (see below), but I don't know which ones are (some are obvious some are not) safe to turn off. Please advise. Maybe I need more speed or memory. Maybe the little dog in Win Patrol is peeing on my discs. Who knows ?

Hardware / software: Gigabyte socket 478 with 384mbs of PC100 ram. TEAC burner, M-Audio 5.1 card, legacy video card. ----------

NERO 5.5.10.13, Windows Media Player 9, Audacity 1.2.6, Bonk Audio Encoder and V-COM fix it (Version 5). ......... Thanks for reading all this baloney.

[jaclaz]

If I were you I would first try with a less bloated burning app:

http://www.imgburn.com/

I would also check ASPI layer/Manager/Driver/whatever:

http://www.nu2.nu/aspi/

http://aspi.radified.com/

jaclaz

[Jolaes]

Listen to jaclaz.

After switching the CD burner and reinstalling the OS this is more than likely a software problem.

I suggest switching to Process Explorer and Advanced Task Manager in order to pin down the resource hog. (Your screenshots do not show how much free memory you have when burning, how much your CPU is stressed, and if you have buffer underruns... You might have constant ongoing error correction at hardware level (in the burner) which is not successful. Even if you cannot monitor this, a longer-than-usual burning of the same source material can be a warning for that.

So check if your hard drives and optical drives are operating in their optimal UDMA mode. (Check BIOS if you have made changes before, and verify in Win98 as well.)

Vanilla Nero, even an older one such as v5.5 installs unnecessary codecs and stuff. You might not need those. But its memory footprint roughly is on par with that of a recent ImgBurn release. Your decision. If you only write audio discs, advanced functions like high precision RAW writing (to make 1:1 copy of certain copy protected material) are not that important.

Burning the ISO will only have significant advantage if you used compressed source material (MP3, Ogg etc) before and wrote those ON THE FLY to CD-DA track.

[loblo]

If I were you I would first try with a less bloated burning app:

http://www.imgburn.com/

+1

Might just be that your Nero 5 can't work properly with recent optical medias. I have Nero 7 on Windows ME and it just can't burn certain CDs/DVDs at all when ImgBurn has no problems with them.

ImgBurm kicks a** btw.

Edited February 19, 2011 by loblo

[Stuckin98]

Thank you loblo and Jolaes. I downloaded imgburn and tried it. I definitely have to go to their site and get some instructions about how to use it, because I did burn a disk that plays fine on the computer. Unfortunately, the same disk just goes buzzzzzzzzzzz, in my Onkyo player (Mfg. late 2007). One of the best and last of a dying breed. Sniff sniff. I know I have to stop being so inflexible, but I really like my old audio equipment with the gold anodized face plates. Wow ! Actual metal ! .......... Alan

[submix8c]

Um, hate to say this (here goes! be gentle...) -

If you burn a CD on a PC (even creating a "real" CD, e.g. WAV files), they may or may not play on a "home player" (e.g. Kenwood) but should always play on a PC. Unless that "player" is pretty darn new. We have a Panasonic DVD player (2 yrs old) hooked up to the stereo and it even has a tendency to "stutter" when playing "burned" CD's (either CD-DATA or CD-Music at 16x - haven't burned one slower yet to try - need to use "older" burner and "slower" CD-R's to try). Heck, may even work better with "older" CD-R rated at specific speeds (i.e. not Multi-Speed "newer").

Alternative is to get an MP3-rated player (they make "portables" too - Sound Engineer friend payed $$$ for his "gigging") and load it up with MP3's or just use CD's... if it'll play burned MP3's, it'll play burned Standard Music CD-s.

Sorry, fact of life...

Edited February 19, 2011 by submix8c

[Stuckin98]

Thanks ! That was helpful. Walmart did have some small players for $30 that would accept a number of different disk formats. I don't know about the quality, but you can always return it. Alternately, I could try experimenting with my existing DVD player since it has some extra RCA outputs for audio.