haven't had the memorex external long enough to really evaluate it with others, but so far disks it burns play mostly ok in my finicky old jam box which is kind of my test cd player, if I'm going to have problems with a disk, they'll fail in that one before other newer players.
The memorex isok so far, I've never owned a memorex drive and have heard good and bad about them.
The tss corp samsung drives the sata ones have given me trouble with audio cds, I get buffer under-run errors avoided messages from nero when burning audio cds, but not any other data disks, so something about those drives doesn't do well with audio cds.
Even so, those cds will play in most players, but enough won't work in older players that I think it's a combination of burning too fast, and maybe the drive doesn't do as well at the faster speeds as other drives might since 16x is the standard now even for audio cd burning, it's hard to find drives that go down to 8x, but if the liteons stil will, and the lg I just got today is a winner, like you said, kind of flimsy tray, but disks burned at 8x play beautifully and seek quickly in my junk cd player with both tayo udyne disks and the cmc magnetic lightscribe disks I've tried.
cmc magnetics now makes verbatim too.One other cool thing about the lg burner it's sata too is that when it varifies, the disk tray doesn't open, so it apparently can re-initialize the drive without having to remount the cd.
It's a bit noisy, but I'll sacrifice a little noise for reliable burns any time.
I really should probably take the memorex back,but I'm really interested to see if disks can be burned at 16x which will play reliably in those old players.
and I get no buffer under run errors avoided messages like i got with the samsung tss corp burners.
I wonder if they've got a flash update for those drives, I've read there are really only two different chipsets that are in most of these drives, nec and the other I can't remember, but the lg drives have that I think.
We have a friend in our little group, he don't say much but we've worked together a lot on this cd burning stuff, and he has a passion for that sort of thing,
and he likes the lg burners.so far, bar none, my plextor seems to be the best drive I've ever owned that px716 will burn disks at 48x which will play in finicky old players, and that's really something, but plextor does a lot of voodoo with dynamic drive calibration, and all sorts of stuff that makes my head spin when I read about it 'grin'.
Who ever invented this stuff are some really fart smellers, but they're just humans so they didn't get it perfect.
But I'm going to nail this down, I can't stand the thought of shipping out another order or someone showing up with backing tracks and not being able to play them I know it's not my fault because no matter what you do, some older players just won't play burned media, that's confirmed even some newer dvd players, well, not now but as late as 2000 I had a dvd player which manual specifically said don't put burned media in to it or it might damage it.
i did so anyway, and it will play them and hasn't seemed to hurt the drive any. Even under the best circumstances, the reflectivity ofburned media is just enough different than pressed cds that early drives just couldn't hack it sometimes.
but you can get damned close to 100 percent by getting the right combination of media, burning drive, and speeds.
But it's kind of not an exact science, because some combinations of media and drives work in one situation where another might work better in a different situation.
and nobody agrees 100 percent on everything, \this stuff is talked about all over the place on different forums and I think sometimes at a certain level, it's a crap shoot.
This is a finicky technology, like on my old player that is prone to be finicky, will sometimes play perfectly disks that didn't play the day before, so what changed?
I wonder if some disks freshly burned take a little while for the dye to cure, maybe after a few days it becomes more reflective, the dye definitely doesn't stay in a steady state, it can change according to a lot of things, fade over time, nobody knows yet how long these things will really last, even with accelerated aging tests, it's just simulated with heat and humidity, but that's not the real deal.
Some folks say cds are going out, but I think they'[re still important for the same reason selling t-shirts, or posters, or anything like that, grabbing a cd on the spot at a local event to see your favorite artist isn't the same psychological effect as telling them go download it someplace, so I think a cd, or dvd, or something like that will be important for a long time, you know they tried putting these little flash card thingies in jam boxes and it didn't go over very well, and yeh some new cars have hard-drives in them, and ipod ports and such, but the humble cd still seems to be popular, I know all the cab drivers play them in the transit vehicles, and everyone i ride with has a cd player in the car, some may have multi-format, but cds are good for folks who aren't computer people, and not everyone is, or some are, but are marginal in that they don't utilize them for the stuff we do, well, like my clients, they may have a laptop, but not know a thing about burning or such, that's my job 'grin'.
I'm seeing more and more places, well like graphic audio offering box sets oftheir books and such on mp3 cds, which is a good thing, because i trust any of these drives more for data burning because there's that extra level of error correction, you don't have on an audio cd.
And mp3 cds or data cds with lossless say flac or some such, i don't think any of the multi-format drives read flac but most will do mp3 and some wma, and those drives don't give problems like the older audio players only units, even the cheap ones.
Hey, speaking of different ways to do things, one of our clients wants to carry her backing tracks for nathan the guy I'm doing an album for on her laptop.
I suggested an external usb sound card as a better option than the onboard one to go to a pa, but we really probably
need several i/o choices because you never know what they might run in to.I've heard of direct boxes and seen some advertised for getting signal from a mini 3.5, not a very good connection and prone to noise and ground loops, laptops are notorious for hum and buzz when connected to other electronics, but an isolating transformer direct box of some type might be the ticket, or an appropriate external sound card, but even a usb one can exhibit ground loop problems depending on what they're dealing with and some of these old churches and stuff, well, you know how it goes.
so any ideas I can give to robin and nathan that won't break the bank?If she's at the board she could simply use a mini trs to rca and go in the tape inputs, if they let her do that, or if she has to feed down a mic cable from the state, then she'll need the direct box.
One way to completely elinimate grounding problems of course is to have the laptop running on batteries and have a good charge and extra batterys on hand so as to not have to share mains power with the building if she's doing the split y thing at the board.
we're having thanksgiving with them so I have time to thinnk about it and talk about it when we go over there.
I want to help them, they've been really good customers and friends and this is the second album they've done with me.
This album is going to be even better than the last, we're over half way through it. At 10:42 PM 11/19/2011, you wrote:
Well I just had a few computers for repairing in the shop, and the drives were all bad; kept getting blu screens during windows installs, the copying would take forever etc. When I went to look, all drives had 1 thing in common, they were memorex! Not sure on the quality (never really bought one myself) but it seems they aren't as good. How has your's worked out? I replaced those with tss or lite-ons, and problems gone. BTW, it seems the newer sata tss drives are the ones with probs, probably a bad chipset choice or something; I've got a few of the older IDE ones (from 2007) and they are marvelous! HTH, D!J!X! -----Original Message----- From: realmusicians-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:realmusicians-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Chris Belle Sent: Saturday, November 19, 2011 8:44 PM To: realmusicians@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: [realmusicians] Re: find good optical drives for burning audio cds Hey DJX, knew i could count on good info from you. Wayne and me like lg burners, but your right, those trays seem a bit flimsy, the one I just got seems that way, but seems to burn ok, but we'lll see how long it lasts. It's those very same samsungs the tss corp that are giving me fits, yes I mean won't burn audio cds lower than 16x. Imgburn lies I think, the it will show you those lower speeds, but i don't think it's really burning that slow, my cd burning tech buddy who's also on this list and I have done some research, and the speeds are dictated by the firmware and chipset, not the software. But nero usually reports the speeds the drive can handle. I do like imgburn as it will tell you who really made the disks you burn, so will nero but you got to press shift-enter when you query disk info. If you truly are getting imgburn to burn at lower speeds with the samgsungs, please let us know how and time it I kind of think it might not be doing it. I like liteon burners too, have had pretty good luck with them. YOu say they go down to 8x? Verbatim used to be my favorite disks, but i think they changed manufacturing, and I switched to tayo udyne. Verbatim is made by cmc magnetics now, and so are these staples brand lightscribe disks I picked up on sale, they seem ok, especially with this new lg burner. The memorex drive I got yesterday seems to do good at 16x but the verdict is still out till I get some disks to my people with finiky drives. I thik though us compiling a list of drive vendors who make drives that will atleast really go down to 8x for audio cds is good. It really seems to make a difference on older players, and there's just enough of them still around to make me a little nervous. Like you, we really pride ourselves on maintaining quality, and our customers depend on our work to be right. Again, thanks for the good info. I'm going to buy some lg's and liteons. At 02:12 PM 11/19/2011, you wrote: >Hey Chris, Until not so long ago, I've had good work with >toshiba/samsung (tss corp), but they've been putting out some weird stuff lately. >My personal drive choice is lite-ons for now. >Sony's are loud, and lg's have tray issues sometimes. > >Now when you say lower than 16x, do you mean for writing discs? It >could be the software you're using, with IMGBurn, I can lower it to >whatever, and the discs write at that speed. My lite-ons here at least write at 8x. >I burn discs for a variety of applications, and I've never heard of >issues with them; I use Verbatim cd's and dvd's for work though. >Most systems I've built to this day use lite-on, some others use >samsung, and none of the lite-on users have complained about their >drives on their systems; these are computers from your basic home rig, >office machines, gaming tower, daws and servers. >I used a Sony once, it was loud, but good; but you have to pick and >choose wisely. Some are good at reading, but suck at wriing, others are >the opposite; laser pint technology is out there, these drives just >haven't implemented it well. >Chipsets do matter, there are a few made by NEC that are supposedly >king of the hill, have to look them up, but I think lite-on uses them often. > >HTH, D!J!X! > >-----Original Message----- >From: realmusicians-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx >[mailto:realmusicians-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Chris Belle >Sent: Saturday, November 19, 2011 9:26 AM >To: realmusicians-freelists.org >Subject: [realmusicians] find good optical drives for burning audio cds > >Well, I've come to the conclusion that these samsun drives, the cd >burners anyway just don't cut the mustard when burning audio cds. > >I get buffer underrun errors avoided by nero, and issues with disks not >playing in older cd players, unaviodable in some cases no matter what >you do, but the deal is is that most of these newer burners won't go >down below 16x. > >I have the king daddy >plextor px716 a in an external version, and in many circles that's >consider the cadalac of burners, but I need to find some other drives >that do well at burning audio cds that play well in old nd new players >alike as much as possible. > >does anyone know of available drives that go down below 16x? > >I picked up a memorex drive, normally I wouldn't buy one, but the tech >at the store was very nice and spent a lot of time with me, but he gave >me a bum steer, it won't go below 16x either, but it may according to >my prelim tests do better at recording audio cds even at this fast rate >because I have a cranky cheap cd players that's old and it's sort of my >test machine, if cds will play in that old thing, then it's likely >they'll play in most players. > >the folks I deal with, lots of church folks sometimes tend not to have >the latest stuff, you know the old church with the board that's been >there for 30 years, and they finally got donated a cd deck from the >90s, still good, but old. > >I need to be able to be as close to 100 percent on this stuff as I can. > >so what burner recommendations can you guys make? > >Yes, I've done gone through the media shuffle, I have tayo udyne disks, >cmc magnetic disks, made by verbatim, and also cmc magnetics are >branded by other manufacturers too, you can't tell by brand names who >really makes the disks, you have to read the code some software like >imgburn, nero, and other programs will tell you who really made the disk. > >But burning speed I think still ploays a part, and I've read all the >stuff about constant angular velocity, riting strategies, and well, >nobody agres on this stuff, it's kind of a crap shoot, but surely every >drive out there isn't 16x or nothing unless you want to go higher? > >I've heard that there are two different chip sets in most drives nec >and something else, and I read someplace the new lg burners will still >go down to 8x. > >so Djx, >you probably do more system building than anyone else on here, but >others experiences welcome too, what drives do you guys have luck with? > >I want more of these plextor px716 drives they makethem in sata pata >and usb firewire, but though they're talked about, everywhere seems to >be out of them. > >I'm going to send some test cds to some folks from this meorex drive to >see how they work out, but we're all faced with this problem, because >when our old drives wear out, any of us doing duplication will need to >replace with something that will work everywhere. > >And there's just enough of these older cd players around to still make >it a concern. >so let's see how close to 100 percent we can get for all our sakes. > > > > >For all your audio production needs and technology training, visit us >at > >www.affordablestudioservices.com >or contact >Chris Belle >cb1963@xxxxxxxxxxxxx >or >Stephie Belle >stephieb1961@xxxxxxxxxxxxx >for customized web design For all your audio production needs and technology training, visit us at www.affordablestudioservices.com or contact Chris Belle cb1963@xxxxxxxxxxxxx or Stephie Belle stephieb1961@xxxxxxxxxxxxx for customized web design
For all your audio production needs and technology training, visit us at www.affordablestudioservices.com or contact Chris Belle cb1963@xxxxxxxxxxxxx or Stephie Belle stephieb1961@xxxxxxxxxxxxx for customized web design
