CD Recorders usually give you two methods of recording a disc ? DAO and TAO. Consult your manual/help system to find out how to switch between them. Each mode has its advantages and disadvantages.
TAO writes one track at a time. Between each track, the laser in your CD recorder is switched off briefly. This causes there to be 2 second gaps between each track. On a live recording, these gaps are undesireable, so DAO is usually preferred.
With DAO the laser is left switched on for the entire disc. This means you can control how long the gaps are between tracks ? you can have 10 second gaps, 2 second gaps, 0.5 second gaps... even no gaps! I have not yet found a person that would prefer you to use gaps than a gapless recording. Consult your manual. Find out how to make gapless recordings.
A lot of newbies seem to think that if you record something in DAO mode, a CD player will not be able "seek" tracks. This is plain wrong.
Whether it makes any difference depends on the recorder, the media and the player.
Put simply, a CD recorder contains a laser that "burns" tiny parts of the disc to make them darker ? this is how information is stored. If disc is spinning round faster, the laser has less time to burn each bit of the disc, so the dark bits aren't quite as dark.
This might mean that the player has trouble telling the difference between the dark bits and the light bits.
Most CD recorders take this into account and turn up the laser power when burning at high-speed, but how well yours copes is a matter for you to decide.
Generally speaking, burning at speeds of up to 4x should not cause any problems.
While on the subject of burning speeds, it is not true that a CD burnt at 2x can only be read at 2x ? burning speed does not effect reading speed like this. However, if you burn so fast that it causes errors, this may slow down reading the CD back.
It is widely held that brand-name CDs are the best. Exactly which brand is best will depend on your exact setup.
Taiyo Yuden are usually touted as the best of the pack. Their factory is in Japan and they make CDRs for (among others) TDK and Sony. They also manufacture discs with their own brand on them and ones with no logo at all.
In general, it seems most of the Japanese factories put more care into their CDs than the Taiwanese ones.
It is really too early to say ? CDRs have not been around for very long. Experts predict that a well-made CDR if handled correctly could last for up to 200 years. However long they last, it should be longer than DATs or Cassette Tapes.
Standalone recorders are designed to operate as part of a stereo system rather than a computer. There are several differences between them and their PC counterparts. Here are some advantages and disadvantages:
Advantages:
Disadvantages:
Recommendations will follow in a later revision of this FAQ.
Standalones require special discs that support a technique called Serial Copy Management System (SCMS). SCMS discs are usually marketed under phrases such as "For Audio Use Only" or "For Consumer".
As with PC recorders, it is best to use brand-name blanks like TDK.
Short answer: your enemy!
Long answer: SCMS, often pronounced as "scums", is short for Serial Copy Management System. It is a copy-prevention system embedded in most consumer grade digital audio recording equipment, including DAT recorders, MiniDiscs and stand-alone CD burners.
Under SCMS, you are allowed to make a copy of any original recording, but not a copy of a copy. Any piece of digital media has one of three types:
There is no easy way to work around these restrictions without a computer-based CD burner, so when you trade for discs, ask for them to be unprotected if possible. However, most people who use PC-based burners won't know what this is and won't know how to set their software up to do this ? to make matters worse, the default setting is often to record the CDs as protected or duplicates.
See also http://www.mitsuicdrstore.com/SCMS_nh.html
There are two common ways of defining the difference between these two methods. The first is more technically correct, but the second is a more useful definition, and it's what people in alt.music.bootlegs mean when referring to "on the fly" and "off the fly".
It is usually best to burn "off the fly" ? in other words, make a copy of the original CD as WAV files on your hard disc and then record them to CD. Burning directly from CD to CD can result in glitches. Here's why...
Your hard drives and CD drives are normally attached to things called IDE controllers (unless you have a SCSI system ? most people don't). Systems have 2 IDE controllers. Each IDE controller can have 2 devices attached. Your setup will probably be something like:
PC ----- Primary IDE -------- Hard Drive
| |
| |
| --- (empty)
|
|
--- Secondary IDE ------ CD-ROM
|
|
--- CD Recorder
Now, an IDE controller is what allows the drives to communicate with the rest of the PC. However, an IDE controller can only do one thing at a time. When you burn on the fly from an audio CD, you are asking your secondary IDE to read from your CD-ROM and write to your CD recorder at the same time. It does this by reading a little bit of data and then quickly switching modes and writing a little bit of data.
This requires a lot of work on the part of your PC, operating system, IDE controller, CD-ROM, CD Recorder and even the discs themselves. Often, something will go wrong. Maybe there's a fingerprint on the CD-ROM and the IDE controller takes just a little bit too long reading it. Then the CD Recorder will run out of data to burn, so you'll end up with a shiny new coaster.
It really is too easy for things to go wrong when burning on the fly from an audio CD. Even if the CD appears to have burnt correctly, the sound quality may not be as good as you'd get with burning from WAV files on your hard disc.
See also: http://pages.cthome.net/homepage/eac/cdtocd.htm
Generally, Plextor's get the best reviews, but if you're careful, it really shouldn't make much difference. See also:
http://www.cdrfaq.org/faq05.html#S5-1
Your CD is spinning at thousands of revolutions per minute, there are lasers shooting ? it's all quite exciting really. Extracting a perfect copy of a song in extreme conditions like this seems less like an exercise of precise science and more like a black art. However, there are some software writers who do study such witchcraft, and here is what they've created:
If you want a perfect copy of a CD, then these are your tools. To set up EAC, refer to http://pages.cthome.net/homepage/eac/setup.htm. CD Paranoia is a fairly complicated command-line program, but there is a nice graphical front-end for it called Grip http://www.nostatic.org/grip.
Download this software and use it whenever you need to create WAV files from a CD.
Firstly, you will need to extract the perfect WAV files from the source disk. How to do that is answered in the previous question. Open up your CD burning software. Select all the WAV files you've just created and put them into a new audio CD. Make sure you set the gaps between each track at 0 seconds (you may need to put 2 seconds gap before the first track). Put your software into Disk-At-Once (DAO) mode. Consult your manual for details of how to do this. Now record your CD! (To be a complete perfectionist, you may want to specify a speed of 4x or below when asked what speed to burn the CD at.)
SCMS is a very irritating feature of standalone burners, and if you're planning on trading with the owner of one of these devices, it is polite to avoid adding SCMS protection to their CDs. Exactly how this is done depends on your software.
In Nero [Win], once you have selected which tracks to record, highlight them all and choose properties from the right-click menu. In the properties section, find the "Protected" check-box and make sure it is empty.
In cdrecord [Linux], use the "-copy" parameter.