Due to all of the recent tips we’ve been doing on hard drives and CD burning we’ve been getting tons of additional questions and comments. We hope to eventually get through most of them, but we don’t want to turn inSync into a computer forum in the process. We are in the audio business after all. Balance is the key. However one interesting CD-R issue came up recently that should be addressed. A few people have inquired about new “error proof” CD burners that are just starting to appear on the market. The idea is that they monitor the buffer, and instead of letting it run out, forcing them to burn a defective disc, they can temporarily stop recording and resume when there is more data in the buffer. Sounds good on paper, doesn’t it? Aside from the very dubious premise that ALL CD errors are caused by buffer under-runs, us old timers in the audio CD world know that turning off the laser during a burn has serious consequences (see WFTD Disc At Once).
If you plan to use your CDR as a master for mass duplication is it very important that the entire disc be written in one pass. Turning the laser off and back on again will actually create errors on a disc. These errors don’t often cause major problems for the playback devices we use, but the machinery in a CD manufacturing plant will kick one of these discs out in a heartbeat. They’ll have to take your “master” disc and reburn another one for you, which of course they are happy to do and happy to charge you for (yes it is still possible to pay $60 for a blank CD-R disc!).
Given the improved efficiency in drives and computers these days the good old buffer under-run is something we don’t hear too much about except for users trying to burn at really high speeds, which we don’t recommend for audio discs anyway. Obviously there are a number of issues still to be sorted out here (specific compatibility issues not the least among those), but the important thing to take away from this right now is that you definitely do not want the laser turning off and on when you are burning audio discs, and as such we do not currently recommend the “error proof” technology.