In article , Laurence Payne
wrote:
On Sat, 23 May 2009 00:04:47 +0100, Eeyore
wrote:

CDRs really. And I don't know if it's the make of the blank alone ( I
usually use 'name' ones of some reasonably quality reputation ) or the
drives pack up early. I've thrown out more CD drives than any other
piece of PC kit.

The first generation of CD drives certainly seemed to have about a 3
year life.

A lot of my failed CD-Rs date from days before I realised that burning
at the manufacturer's maximum rated speed was NOT a good idea.

I've often had a situation where a newly-burnt CDR would not play properly
in a specific device or drive. Like the above, I have found that lowering
the write speed can help.

I've also found it helps to use a particular brand, TDK in my experience
works well. But this does seem to vary both with choice of writer, and with
the playback/reading devices.

*As yet* I've not encountered any examples of a CDR that used to play fine
but seems to have aged or deteriorated. Now approaching a decade for the
oldest. So although I suspect problems may show up eventually, I've been OK
thus far.


The
better burn utilities prominently feature a choice of burn speeds.
Unfortunately many of the consumer-aimed programs hide this setting.

I've found that some writers may also simply ignore a speed slower than
they can be bothered to accept. For example, the CD writer I have in my
day-to-day-use home machine won't go any slower than x4 even if the
software tells it to. The DVD writer seems to totally ignore any speed
instructions when used to burn a CDR, and what it produces is useless for
my purposes. Fortunately, the CDR writer seems to do a decent job.

Alas, this all seems a minefield in my experience as it seems impossible to
predict which burner/disc brand/speed combination will give the best
results in terms of how well some other specific player can then cope with
the resulting discs.

At one level you can just experiment. The snag is - what happens X years
later when you change playing device, and the discs that played fine on old
devices don't play correctly on it? So far, this has been OK in my
experience, but is this just luck?...

Slainte,

Jim

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