Last-modified: 2000/09/21
Version: 2.22
Problems that arise when burning a CD-R.
Some suggestions that fix most common problems:
It means you have an attractive new coaster for your table.
The CD writing process can't be interrupted in mid-session. To prevent this from happening, the makers of CD recorders put a write buffer in the drive, usually 512K or 1MB. Data read from the hard drive, tape, or another CD is stored in the buffer, and pulled out as needed by the recorder.
If the recorder requests data from the write buffer, but there's none there, it's called a buffer underrun. The disc is still spinning, but there's no data to write, so the recording process aborts.
You can still use the disc with multisession CD-ROM drives by closing the session and starting another, assuming there's enough space left on the CD, and assuming your pre-mastering software didn't choose to finalize the disc for you.
Advice for preventing buffer underruns is scattered throughout this FAQ. A brief summary:
A utility included with Microsoft Office, called "FindFast", will occasionally start up and scan your hard drives. Disabling this by deleting the shortcut in the Windows\Start Menu\Programs\StartUp folder may be necessary.
If you're using Windows, see the sub-sections on Auto-Insert Notification and VCACHE settings, below.
http://www.adaptec.com/support/faqs/bufunder.html has a comprehensive
collection of buffer underrun info.
http://www.adaptec.com/support/configuration/cdrec.html is interesting reading for users with CD-Rs attached to Adaptec SCSI cards. They're pretty far on the conservative side, but if you're having trouble this may help you.
An article by Dana Parker entitled "CD-R on the Safe Side: Seven Rules of Successful CD Recording" in the April 1997 issue of Emedia Professional (http://www.emediapro.net/EMtocs/emtocapr.html) listed the Seven Habits of Successful CD-R Users:
Some of the Windows-based recording software recommend turning off Auto-Insert Notification. Having this on can interfere with closing sessions or even just inserting discs into the drive. Most of the recent software will disable it automatically, but some of the older products require you to disable it manually. You can do so under Win95/Win98 by opening the "System" icon in the Control Panel, and selecting "Device Manager". For each item under CD-ROM, select the device, click on the "Settings" tab, and make sure the "Auto Insert Notification" checkbox is unchecked. [With a vanilla Win95 setup I got SCSI errors when AIN was off for my CD-R but on for my CD-ROM, even if the CD-ROM drive wasn't in use at the time.]
If you're using WinNT, you can turn it off with the "TweakUI" program available in PowerToys (available from the Microsoft web site at http://www.microsoft.com/), or by modifying a registry key with Regedit32 (0=disabled, 1=enabled):
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ SYSTEM \ CurrentControlSet \ Services \ Cdrom \ AutorunIf your software automatically turns AIN off, and you can't figure out how to turn it back on, the TweakUI program may be able to help. Check the "Paranoia" settings. (Incidentally, if installing the Power Toys screws up your icons, select "Rebuild Icons" from the "Repair" menu.)
Sidebar: the trouble with Auto Insert Notification is that it periodically attempts to find a valid disc in the CD recorder. A blank disc isn't very interesting to Windows, so nothing happens. When the table of contents is written to the disc, it suddenly becomes interesting; and if Autorun or Autoplay are enabled, enough activity is generated by Windows' attempts to read the disc that the write fails.
Because it only affects CDs with actual data being written to them, a test write won't end in failure. It can be very frustrating to have 100% success with test writes and 100% failures with actual writes! With disc-at-once recording, the process will abort very near the start of recording, probably leaving an empty but useless disc. With track-at-once recording, it will fail at the end, and you may still be able to finalize the disc. Audio CDs will most likely work fine even if interrupted at the end of the write process.
IMPORTANT: if you are using DirectCD for Windows, you must have AIN turned *on*, or some things won't work quite right. The most obvious failure mode is that long filenames aren't shown, but some reports indicate that data on the disc can get trashed as well. This can make life interesting if you're also using a conventional writing application, unless the application is good about turning AIN off before writing. The other Windows applications currently sold by Adaptec (notably Easy CD Creator) will automatically disable Auto-Insert Notification when appropriate and re-enable it afterward, so you don't have to worry about AIN at all.
One problem with Win95 is that by default the size of the file cache is unrestricted. This means that all available memory will eventually get filled up with file data, which will cause the virtual memory system to start swapping out pages from executing applications. When something needs to be executed from a page that has been swapped out, it takes time to pull it back in off the disk. While this is happening, the CD recorder's buffer could drain completely.
The procedure is simple:
The [vcache] change has reportedly cured severe buffer underrun problems with some versions of CDRWIN and removed popping noises during digital audio extraction with Easy CD Creator. It's a good thing to do to any PC running Win95. It's not necessary for WinNT. It's not clear whether this will help with Win98, but it doesn't seem to hurt.
If you are uncomfortable tweaking your SYSTEM.INI file, try CacheMan at http://www.outertech.com/english/index.html. It allows you to modify the above settings, and a few more besides.
Typical symptoms can be described like this:
The SCSI driver needs to believe that the CD-ROM drive can handle multisession discs. Most likely you will need to update your SCSI drivers before this will work.
(This problem was reported with an HP4020i and a Buslogic BT946C controller; if you have an HP drive you should get the c4324hlp.vxd driver from the HP web site. See section 6 for the address.)
One possible cause of this problem is writing a multisession disc in MODE-1 format. Some older CD-ROM drives incorrectly assume that a MODE-1 disc can't be multisession, so they don't look for additional sessions unless it's written in MODE-2 (CD-ROM/XA) format.
Also, if the final session on the CD isn't closed, standard CD players may become confused (the NEC 6Xi certainly does under Win95). This doesn't mean that the *disc* must be closed, just that the *session* must be closed. (Actually, the NEC 6Xi doesn't like open discs either... sigh.)
A note on one of the Ricoh pages indicates that the Ricoh 1420C is unable to read sessions smaller than 3 minutes (about 26MB) until firmware 1.6x.
There's a couple of possibilities. One is that your data source can't keep up with the CD-R; try using disc-at-once writing from a disc image with the speed set to 1x. If it seems to be getting worse over time, you may just need to defragment your hard drive.
If that fails, a number of people have discovered that the problem is a faulty CD-R unit (similar behavior has been reported on Sony and HP units, which have different mechanisms). You should try 1x writing from a fast source and with different sets of data before contacting the manufacturer, since they will likely tell you to do exactly that anyway.
Be sure that there aren't environmental factors creating difficulties. CD-R units are usually built to handle small shocks, but having a set of speakers playing loud music on the same table as a CD-R may cause it to skip, resulting in a failed write. Sonic booms, heavy construction equipment, and nuclear detonations may have similar effects.
It's also possible that you simply have a bad batch of media. Try a different type and brand of disc. Some distributors (e.g. dataDisc) will exchange media that's provably defective.
Be careful with Advanced Power Management functions on some PCs. If the keyboard and IDE devices are completely idle, the system may decide that nothing is going on and switch to a low-power mode. Ditto for screen savers that kick in after the system has been idle for a certain period.
Most CD recorders need to clear their memory between the "test" pass and the "write" pass. For some recorders, the only command that does this is "eject". If the recorder has a tray it just goes out and back in, but if it uses a caddy manual intervention is needed.
Some CD-R packages allow you to start the real write pass a few seconds after the test pass has succeeded. They may not disable this even though they know that the disc will have to be ejected. Make sure the option is set to "wait until told to continue."
A very simple test is to take a CD that DOES work, copy it, and try both (this ensures that your problems aren't being caused by, for example, a drive that doesn't support multisession CDs).
Sometimes the firmware can be at issue. In one specific case, a Goldstar GCD580B CD-ROM drive was able to read CD-Rs under Win95 but not MS-DOS 6.22. Upgrading the firmware from v1.01 to v1.24 solved the problem.
If it fails with different kinds of media, the CD-ROM drive either doesn't like discs written with your recorder, or doesn't like CD-R media at all. In one case, returning the CD-ROM for an identical unit resolved the problems.
While there are stringent specifications for discs, there are no such specifications for CD players and CD-ROM drives. They just have to play the discs. If the disc and the drive are both marginal, you lose.
The ISO-9660 standard says the version number (a semicolon followed by a number at the end of every filename) has to be there. Most operating systems simply ignore it, but until recently the Mac didn't, causing some problems.
(For the Mac, look at "ISO 9660 File Access" in the System:Extensions folder with Command-I. If the version shown is 5.0 or greater, your system should handle the version numbers just fine. If not, you should update your system software.)
If you can't find a way to work around it, "mkisofs" has an option to omit the version number when constructing an ISO-9660 image.
http://www.adaptec.com/support/configuration/cdrec.html has some advice on SCSI configuration. Basically, check your cabling and termination (see section (4-17) for more advice there), turn off features you don't need, and make sure Auto Insert Notification is off (see section (4-1-1)).
(This is for failures other than buffer underruns. For those, see section (4-1) and perhaps section (4-4).)
If it's failing right as the disc is being finalized, and you're recording in track-at-once mode, try recording in disc-at-once mode instead. It has been suggested that some recorder+media combinations have trouble reading the PMA (Program Memory Area, where a copy of the TOC is kept until the disc is finalized) at the end of a write. See section (2-19) for the low-down on disc finalization.
When in doubt, check your ASPI layer. Find out why at http://resource.simplenet.com/primer/aspi.htm.
One user with an ATAPI recorder found that disabling DMA (from the Win98 peripheral properties) made things better.
This was happening frequently with the HP4020i running off an AdvanSys SCSI
card under Win311 (i.e. WfWG). The solution here was to remove IFSHLP.SYS
from the CONFIG.SYS. (IFSHLP.SYS is somehow involved with 32-bit file
access and network support, so you may have to disable both of these before
disabling IFSHLP. You may have better luck under Win95.)
Another user with the same setup found that doing power-up diagnostics and device reset right before burning the CD helped.
This seems to happen on Philips CDD2000-based units, such as the HP4020i, usually a short while after the warranty runs out. The most common cause is a spring that weakens with age, but it might also be due to lubrication breakdown. After a while, the recorder starts failing when trying to write beyond a certain point on the disc.
The ways of dealing with this range from minor system changes to the placement of chicken entrails on selected components. Reducing the DMA rate on the AdvanSys SCSI card (for the HP4020i) may help, buying better SCSI cables and checking for proper termination may make a difference, or even powering off and on again right before the burn. For some users, however, the problem is mechanical rather than spiritual.
One user was told by Philips tech support that if error 50h (write append) occurs, it means the drive has to be returned to the repair center. Other users have been told that the error can occur when attempting to write an empty directory or zero-length file. Under Easy-CD Pro '95, this is reported as error 171-00-50-00 (see the Adaptec web site for a complete list of error codes).
If the fault is caused by the worn spring, it may be possible to fix the problem by replacing the spring. This will definitely void your warranty, and you shouldn't even think about trying this unless the only alternative is to throw the drive away. Jonathan Oei posted some details about the process (search for comp.publish.cdrom.hardware, subject "CDD2000 & Spring Fix", on http://www.dejanews.com/), and a detailed description of the procedure can be found on http://www.fadden.com/doc/fix-hp4020i.txt.
This procedure requires some special tools (mini torx drivers and really fine jeweller's pliers), and involves disassembling much of the drive. If you open up the drive and remove the circuit boards, you will see that the laser writing assembly is moved by a DC stepper motor. The motor has a plastic drive gear that is meshed with a plastic "rack" on the laser. The spring in question is a piece of wire that pushes the rack against the drive gear, so when it weakens the gear slips and the write fails. Replacing the 0.012" wire with a 0.02" diameter wire solves the problem.
The high temperature in the drive may contribute to the breakdown of the lubricants that allow the laser head to travel. You may be able to prevent the situation by installing a fan.
Instructions on how to lubricate the drive are once again available. See http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Pines/5318.
This question is also covered in the HP4020i FAQ, available at http://www.cd-info.com/CDIC/Technology/CD-R/HP-FAQ.html.
There's a 150-sector postgap at the end of the data track. Most programs deal with this automatically, some older ones don't. If you're getting errors, try subtracting 150 from the total number of sectors to read for that track.
There are a few of possibilities, some software and some hardware.
It may be that the system is looking at the disc, not finding a TOC (table of contents), and ejecting it as useless. One way to tell the difference between the operating system rejecting the CD and the drive rejecting the CD is to unplug the SCSI or IDE cable from the back of the CD recorder before inserting the disc.
If the problem is the operating system, you probably need to disable certain features. Under Win95, disable auto insertion for all CD-ROM devices (see section (4-1)). One user found that reinstalling Win95 helped. On the Mac, you may just need more recent drivers. On a Solaris system, remove the recorder (probably the "cdrom" entry) from /etc/vold.conf.
If that doesn't work, make sure the CD-R drive is perfectly level. Apparently some units are sensitive to being tilted at an angle. Some users have had trouble when a CD-R has been on for a while and has overheated, so if you only have trouble when the machine has been powered on for a while, try putting a small fan above the unit to blow air over it.
With some drives, improper SCSI termination can cause this behavior.
For the Yamaha CDR-200/CDR-400, this may be a sign that the drive has broken down and needs to be replaced. See section (5-1-1).
If nothing helps, there's a strong possibility that the drive is mis- aligned and needs to be serviced. This has been known to happen to drives during shipping.
One user reported problems when using the wrong type of caddy. It has to be a Sony-type caddy, which is the kind most commonly found in stores.
The power range of the laser in a CD-R is between 4 and 8 milliwatts. CD-R discs have a section outside the standard recording area called the Program Calibration Area (PCA), which is used to adjust the laser for the brand of media you're using.
The error indicates that the CD-R drive is having trouble calibrating the power setting. Try different brands of media, and if that doesn't work you should have the drive checked by a repair facility.
Some versions of the firmware for the Philips CDD2000 (and HP 4020i) will report a power calibration error if you try to do a 1x write after a 4x read.
It's also good to verify, if your CD recorder is an internal unit, that your power supply has enough capacity to run everything. CD-Rs and CD-RWs need more power when writing than when reading or test-writing.
This was observed with a Yamaha CDR-100. The solution is to go into the Adaptec BIOS (hit Ctrl-A during boot), and disable the "support removable disks under BIOS as fixed disks" option and the "boot from CD-ROM" option.
There's a couple of possibilities: either they aren't there, or they're there but you can't see them. Looking at the disc from different machines (e.g. Mac and PC) should give you some idea.
Out-of-date versions of MSCDEX have been known to "forget" certain files when browsing a disc. If you're using DOS or are using the "real mode" drivers from within Win95, make sure you're using the most recent version of MSCDEX.
Old versions of certain CD creation programs would occasionally omit things when asked to burn a large number of files. These problems haven't been reported for some time, however.
If you were burning a multi-session CD, read the next section.
A common mistake when burning a multisession CD is to forget to link the files from the previous session into the current one. This results in a CD where you can see the new files but none of the old, unless you have a program that lets you choose which session you look at.
If you're using Easy-CD Pro for Win31, CD Creator, or Adaptec Easy CD Creator 3, you can load the contents of all the previous sessions, and burn a new session that has all the files you want. This feature isn't available in Easy-CD Pro 95, which only allows you to link to one previous session.
The files themselves aren't lost forever though: most packages will allow you to extract a track as an ISO-9660 image, and you can use WinImage to pull individual files out of it. If all else fails, CD-R Diagnostic (section (6-2-6)) claims to be able to recover data from "lost" sessions.
One caution: without something like Adaptec's Session Selector, you may not see the last session on the disc anyway. Some CD-ROM drives stop looking for sessions after a certain point.
Good SCSI cables and correct termination are absolutely essential. SCSI bus errors can cause buffer underruns or corrupted data (especially since some vendors ship drives with parity checking disabled).
Bertel Schmitt wrote an excellent article on the ins and outs of proper cabling and termination. The article can be found in text form at http://www.fadden.com/doc/scsi-trm.txt. Granite Digital, a company that makes high-quality cables and terminators, can be found at http://www.scsipro.com/.
If you're using an HP 4020i with the AdvanSys SCSI card, reducing the DMA transfer rate may help.
There are actually two questions here, so I've split them into separate sections. The most common problem is that the audio extracted to the hard drive doesn't quite match the original.
Most problems are due to poor digital audio extraction from the source media. Some CD-ROM drives will return slightly different data every time an audio track is read. Others, like the Plextor line (e.g. 4Plex, 8Plex, and 12Plex, but not 6Plex) will return the same data every time so long as the source media is clean.
The most fundamental problem is that, if the CD is dirty, the error correction may not be able to correct all of the errors. Some drives will interpolate the missing samples, some won't.
Another problem most CD-ROM drives face is "jitter". See section (2-15) for details.
See also section (3-3) on avoiding clicks in extracted audio, and section (5-5) on which CD-ROM drives are recommended.
[ I have yet to see an authoritative answer to this. ]
Suppose you extract the audio track from the copy, and it's an exact binary match of the track you wrote from your hard drive, but the CDs don't sound quite the same. What then?
Most people don't notice any difference between originals and duplicates. Some people notice subtle differences, some people notice huge differences; on better CD players, the differences are harder to hear. Some say CD-R is better, some say worse. While it's true that "bits are bits", there *are* reasons why CD-Rs may sound different even when the data matches exactly.
The manual for the CDD2000 reportedly states that the drive uses 4x oversampling when playing back pressed CDs, but switches to 1x for CD-R. This affects the quality of the D/A conversion, and can make an audible difference.
It has been suggested that the D/A conversion process in the CD player is more susceptible to "jitter" when reading CD-Rs, because the clocking of the bits isn't as precise. A quality CD player will compensate for this automatically. (Note: this kind of jitter is different from the DAE kind of jitter described in section (2-15).) About halfway down on the page at http://www.digido.com/jitteressay.html are some comments about the quality of playback being dependent on how a CD-R is recorded.
Others have asserted that *any* two CDs, pressed or otherwise, will sound slightly different. Some people claim to hear differences in identical CDs from different pressing plants.
http://resource.simplenet.com/primer/losses.htm has some further thoughts, including a table showing signal level differences.
A paper was reportedly submitted to the Audio Engineering Society, entitled, "An Investigation of the Sonic Differences Between Numerically Identical Compact Discs", by Julian Dunn. Preprint 4339, the 101st AES convention.
Some people believe that audio CDs should be recorded at 1x, while others have asserted that, for various technical reasons, 2x is better. Certain kinds of media may work best at specific speeds.
An extremely technical introduction to CD reading is available at http://www.tc.umn.edu/~erick205/Papers/paper.html. This may shed some light on why reading audio CDs is difficult.
If you are finding noticeable differences, try different media, a different player, and a different recorder. There is some evidence that different brands of media and recorders may work better for audio, but in the end it's a highly subjective matter. Some people say CD-Rs sound worse, some people say they sound better.
Some recorders don't correctly extract digital audio if the pregap of the first track isn't exactly two seconds. A bug in the firmware causes the drive to start extracting slightly past the start of the track, and stop extracting slightly past the end. This can result in an audible glitch if the music starts at the exact start of the track, and can cause the drive to fail with an error when extracting the last track on the CD.
CDs that start at 00:02:32 (0 minutes, 2 seconds, and 32 blocks) are surprisingly common. The problem can be worked around manually, by looking at the output of the Jeff Arnold's (freeware) TOC program (available from http://www.goldenhawk.com/) and supplying "/start=" and "/end=" parameters that adjust backward by the number of blocks in excess of two seconds.
For example, if the first track started at 00:02:32, you would subtract 32 from the starting and ending Logical Block Addresses.
A better solution is to use a CD-ROM drive that doesn't have this problem (and most likely can extract audio more quickly than the CD-R can).
The Yamaha CDR-100/102 and the Philips CDD2600 are known to have this problem, though it may get fixed by a firmware update. The Ricoh 6200S reportedly does not return the disc's table of contents correctly for these sorts of discs.
The default audio player in Win95 tries to load the entire file into memory. When an extracted track is 40 or 50MB, and you don't have that much RAM, Win95's virtual memory system starts writing pieces out to disk. The disk thrashes, and you get nowhere.
There are several ways around this. If you right-click on the file and select "properties", you will see a "preview" tab. This will play it directly from disk. Another way is to use a different program. One possibility is the Media Player, which is optionally installed with Win95. You can make it the default WAV file player by selecting View/Options from Win95 explorer, clicking on the "File Types" tab, and choosing "Wave Sound". Double-click on Play and change the program name from "sndrec32.exe" to "mplayer.exe", leaving the "/play" and "/close" flags intact.
You can also use a program like CoolEdit, which will let you preview WAV files from the Open File dialog.
This problem is often experienced by HP7100/7110 users. HP chose to ship packet-writing software with their drives rather than conventional premastering software, leaving users with discs that couldn't be read on a fair number of systems. (The HP7200 is the same drive, shipped with updated firmware and a more complete set of software.)
The following is an excerpt from an Adaptec readme.txt file. It talks about DirectCD, but the problem is inherent in all packet writing solutions:
"When the disc is in the native format used by DirectCD, you will only be able to read the disc on a CD-R device running DirectCD. This is a direct result of the technology used when writing to a CD-R disc. In order to make the disc readable on a standard CD-ROM DirectCD must write certain data to the disc. This provides compatibility with many of the current drives on the market today. Unfortunately, there are still a number of CD-ROM drives that cannot read the packet written media that DirectCD produces. If you experience problems in this area, you should go to System in Control Panel, select Performance, File System, CD-ROM and set the Access Pattern to "No Read-Ahead". If you still experience problems after making this adjustment, it is likely that the CD- ROM drive itself is having problems reading packet written media.If you want to share data between systems, and the remote system isn't guaranteed to have a MultiRead CD-ROM drive, you should write the disc with conventional software.It should also be noted that there is an industry initiative called MultiRead that addresses these issues and has the support of all the major vendors of CD-ROM and CD-R/RW devices. This initiative will eliminate the above problems and should be available on all new drives."
There have been a fair number of people who have burned a CD-ROM only to discover that, while they can read text files, run applications, and look at graphics, they can't extract from .ZIP archives or run compressed applications (e.g. some "Setup.EXE"s under Win95). A common complaint is a dialog with "the file is not a valid win32 application".
The problem they're seeing isn't just corruption of .ZIP files though. Most kinds of files have a lot of redundancy in them. If a single bit is lost out of a long text file, the chances of it being noticed are very slight. For an application, the chances of it causing a failure depend on where in the file the error falls. For a compressed file, though, every bit is significant, and in a .ZIP archive the CRC has a very high probability of detecting errors. (CRC is cyclic redudancy check. Most file archivers compute a 32-bit CRC on the uncompressed input and store it in the archive. When you extract the files, the CRC is checked to ensure that nothing has been damaged.)
Eliminating these errors could be as simple as replacing a bad SCSI cable. One way to narrow the possibilities down is to try the disc in different readers on different machines. If the same error shows up in the same place, the error was introduced during writing rather than while reading the data back. Another thing to try is to burn the same disc twice. If the data written to the CD-Rs doesn't match the original, but they do match each other, then the errors are happening in the same place every time, rather than at random, so the trouble might be with a driver or firmware instead of a flaky cable or bad RAM.
If a file appears to be getting corrupted on the CD-R, try copying it back to the hard drive and then comparing it to the original. If possible, see if the file is missing large chunks or just has sporadic damage throughout. You can use the DOS "fc" command (e.g. "FC /B FILE1 FILE2") or one of the fancier applications listed in section (3-22).
If you can identify the problem as being with the reader or the writer you may be able to focus on just one part of your system. If the trouble appears to be with your writer, and you can't get it to work, try to move it to somebody else's system and see if it works from there. It's possible, though unlikely, that the CD recorder is flaky.
Whatever the case, the place to start is to check all cables, connections, SCSI termination, L2 cache, and RAM. One user with an otherwise properly functioning system was able to fix the CD-R corruption problems by correcting the RAM timings in the BIOS setup. A couple of others found that their problems went away when they disabled the L2 cache on the motherboard. Sometimes adding a new device will make cables (especially longer ones) turn flaky. Sometimes the flakiness only affects one device. Swapping the cables is inexpensive, easy, and very likely to root out the cause of your problems. Section (4-17) has some tips on SCSI stuff.
One last thing: make sure the original files are valid before you go on a wild goose chase!
There are a few possibilities. First and foremost is media compatibility. Not all players get along with all brands of CD-R media. You need to find a combination of recorder, media, and player that get along. Read section (7-2) to learn more. A CD-R media identifier (like the one listed in section (6-2-9)) can help you be sure that you're trying discs from different manufacturers.
If you're trying to use CD-RW media, your odds are even worse. CD-RW discs simply won't play on most CD players.
Another common problem is failing to close the disc at the end of writing. You can't play an audio CD on a common CD player until the session has been closed. You may be able to play it back with the CD recorder though. Also, don't forget that you have to write all of the audio data into the first session of a multisession CD. CD players don't know how to find the later sessions, so tracks written there won't get played.
Sometimes the CD player will spin the disc up but won't start playing it. Sometimes it will have no problem playing the tracks, but will have a great deal of difficulty seeking between tracks or moving fast-forward. Using a different brand of media or a different CD player may produce better results.
If you're getting skips and jumps, make sure that you don't have anti-skip protection enabled. This is usually only available on portable or car players, and you may not be able to disable it on car players.
Some media works better at 1x, 2x, or 4x than it does at other speeds. You may find that slowing down or speeding up the recorder helps.
Finally, remember that you have to write the disc in CD-DA format! If you just write a bunch of .WAV files to a disc in CD-ROM format, it's not going to work in your home stereo.
As with audio CDs, discussed in the previous section, there are several possibilities. The media compatibility issues mentioned above apply to CD-ROM as well.
If you're using CD-RW media rather than CD-R media, you have to be sure that the CD-ROM drive in question is MultiRead compliant. Some older drives are able to read CD-RW media, but most are not.
If the disc was written using a packet writing application like DirectCD (where you format a disc and then copy files directly to it, instead of creating a disc layout and recording a whole bunch of stuff at once), some CD-ROM drives will stumble on packet boundaries. Refer to section (4-21) for information and a possible workaround.
If a packet-written disc was closed in ISO-9660 Level 3 format, it won't be usable on systems that don't support ISO-9660 level 3 (e.g. DOS). If the disc was *not* closed as ISO-9660, and is still in UDF, you will need a UDF driver; see sections (6-3) and (6-4) for an overview and pointers to free drivers.
If you put a VideoCD (White Book) into your CD-ROM drive, you will see a bunch of files and directories like you would on any other CD-ROM. In fact, with the appropriate software installed, on some platforms you can double-click on a file to play the video.
In practice, however, the video files are stored on separate tracks, using CD-ROM/XA MODE-2 FORM-2. This allows more data to be stored on a VideoCD, at the price of less error correction. If the video is short enough, you may be able to copy the disc as a collection of files, but some players may be unable to play back selections if the original disc had more than one track.
You need to use a program like Adaptec's CD Copier or GoldenHawk's CDRWIN to copy the disc track-by-track, preserving the mode of the original.
If your drive only supports track-at-once recording, you may have trouble copying VideoCDs because the starting address gets shifted when the drive writes a gap between tracks. NTI's CD-Copy (section 6-1-12) gives you the option of dropping the last part of the previous track to preserve the start position of the next track.
Note that MODE-2 FORM-2 holds 2324 bytes of data per sector, so instead of a total capacity of around 650MB, you can put closer to 740MB on a disc. If you don't record the VideoCD data files in the correct format, you will find yourself running out of room. (The extra space is gained by throwing out error correction codes that aren't necessary for video data. Writing ordinary data in this format is not recommended.)
Most often this is a problem with auto-insert notification being enabled when it shouldn't be. See the discussion in section (4-1).
One person supposedly fixed a similar problem by replacing the power supply in their computer. Apparently the 200W supply wasn't enough to handle everything that was connected to it, and the extra power drain from the write laser was causing failures.
If you're using track-at-once recording, and the actual write is failing when the disc is 100% complete and the TOC is being written, you may be able to solve your problems by using a different brand of media. See the notes in section (4-9).
It's possible that the disc has developed a region that can't be erased. More likely is that the software or firmware is acting up. If you're using Easy CD Creator, insert a good CD-RW disc, and start the Erase process. Just before you hit the final "OK" button to start the erase, swap the troubled blank disc in place of the good one.
If this succeeds, you probably ought to run it through the erase procedure one additional time before using it.
Super Blank, from http://www.ping.be/kris-schoofs/, reportedly accomplishes the same thing without requiring a disc swap.
If this doesn't work, there is a report that a UV EPROM eraser will do the trick. Experiments have shown that leaving the disc out in direct sunlight for a couple of hours may also help. The resulting disc won't be fully erased, but it may be "blank enough" that you can then use Super Blank to finish the job.
If nothing at all works, make a careful examination of the write surface of the disc. It's possible the disc is physically damaged and can't be used.
This was sent to me by Jac Goudsmit:
"When Adaptec DirectCD refuses to format a CD-RW for packet-writing, it's possible that the disc is not completely blank. This may happen because you chose the "quick" option when you last erased it. The quick-erase option only erases the lead-in area to make the hardware and software think the disc is empty. This is fine if you're going to use the disc for "normal" writing as a CD-ROM, audio disc or whatever.
The packet-writing formatter in DirectCD 2.0a however (apparently) requires the disc to be totally empty, so you really have to do a full erase if the disc contained data previously.
BUT: there's another problem: after you do a full erase and shut down the program you erase with (e.g. EasyCD Pro or Easy CD Creator) it's possible that the DirectCD program won't recognize the disc as valid media, and you still won't be able to format it, until you restart the computer.
Unfortunately this means that if you want to start using a previously recorded CD-RW for packet writing, you'll have to wait a total time of at least an hour and a half for the erase and format to complete..."
It has also been reported that some virus scanners, notably TBAV, can
interfere with the format process and should be disabled.
There are people successfully writing discs with Windows 98, so it *can* be done.
If you're using Easy CD Creator 3, try uninstalling it, rebooting, and then reinstalling it. This seems to fix the problems for the people reporting them. Doing the same for other software may have similar beneficial effects. Apparently ECDC3 installs its own versions of some system drivers, which get overwritten when Win98 is installed. Uninstalling and reinstalling the drivers puts the ECDC3-friendly versions back.
Make sure your ASPI (Advanced SCSI Programmer's Interface) layer is up to date, even if you have an IDE recorder. You can find the "ASPICHK" utility and some notes about how to examine your system on http://www.adaptec.com/support/faqs/aspilayer.html. You should be at v4.57 or later.
This problem has been recognized by Microsoft. The resolution is posted on http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/q186/2/97.asp.
The basic problem is that, after upgrading to Windows 98, copies of some CD-ROMs (usually copy-protected games) will refuse to run, insisting that you insert the original disc. Microsoft has recommended two methods for resolving this issue. The first is to simply use the original disc.
The second recommendation is to make a new copy of the disc under Win98. Why this works is unclear, and the Microsoft support pages aren't much help. They only say that the behavior is not caused by a bug, but rather "design changes in Windows 98". (It appears that using Win98 to write a new session onto an existing disc will also cure the problem, but if you aren't in the habit of leaving the session open on copies of game discs, this won't help you much.)
One possibility is that Win98 returns a value for the volume label that is closer to what is actually stored (perhaps there was some sort of character set conversion or truncation going on in Win95). Copy protected games often check the volume label as a way of obstructing inexperienced software pirates.
Start with http://resource.simplenet.com/primer/udf.htm to get an understanding of what DirectCD is doing.
A popular way to screw up DirectCD's UDF handling is to remove the disc without letting the software finish up. You can accomplish this by rebooting while it's working, attempting to disable it by doing something other than uninstalling it (see section (3-45)), or by turning off auto-insert notification.
If you have DirectCD 2.x, you may be able to recover the data with the included Scan Disc utility. CD-R Diagnostic (6-2-6) may also be able to recover data.
Rule of thumb: don't delete data off your hard drive until the disc is finalized and verified readable. Too many bad things can happen when writing to a disc.
When attempting to copy certain discs, Easy CD Creator (as of v3.x) will say something like:
"The current track contains more than 100 form transitions. Easy CD Creator cannot handle more than 100 form transitions on a single track. The disc cannot be copied."This appears to be a form of copy protection, where a disc uses both FORM-1 and FORM-2 on a CDROM/XA MODE-2 disc.
One user reported that this only happens when trying to copy a Playstation game by first copying the tracks to the hard drive. If you make a copy directly from one disc to the other, the errors won't occur.
According to Adaptec, the message can also occur if the source drive is reporting more than 100 tracks on the disc, or if the source drive is defective in some specific way.
You may have a bad installation of a CD recording program like DirectCD. When you insert a blank disc, the software tries to identify it to give you the opportunity to format it for packet writing.
If you have packet software like DirectCD or PacketCD installed, try uninstalling it and see if the problem goes away. In some cases you might need to get rid of windows\system\iosubsys\scsi1hlp.vxd manually.
Not all DVD players can handle CD-R media. See section (2-13).
Some players that don't work with CD-R discs will work with CD-RW discs. If you're having trouble, try CD-RW media instead.
If CD-R Diagnostic (6-2-6) can't help you, there are places that might be able to. Some examples:
Some applications, notably Easy CD Creator, can only do very simple conversions on audio files. If you are trying to create an audio CD, but the WAV file isn't 44.1KHz 16-bit stereo PCM, you will have to convert it to that format with something like Cool Edit (http://www.syntrillium.com/) before you do the write.
Sometimes a Windows system will get into a state where it thinks that a CD-R or CD-RW data disc is an audio CD. This is very peculiar, since the CD-ROMs aren't "enhanced" discs with both audio and data content. In some cases the problem only happens with a CD recorder -- a CD-ROM drive in the same machine will work correctly -- or vice-versa.
One situation where this is reported to occur is with a JVC XR-W2080 with v2.06 firmware (or an equivalent OEM version). If you have the Adaptec UDF reader loaded, whether manually or as part of installing DirectCD 3.x, the problem will occur. Removing the UDF reader, either with Add/Remove Programs or renaming \Windows\System\Iosubsys\Udfreadr.vxd, is said to fix the problem.
Another occurrence has been reported with Toast 3.7 on a Mac. If a disc was recorded with Toast as CD-ROM/XA instead of CD-ROM, Win98 would see the disc as audio. Win95 and WinNT worked fine on the same disc.
You are most likely running into copy protection. The game publisher has placed "unreadable" sectors on the disc, in an effort to confound disc duplication programs.
Instructions for making "backups" of copy-protected games can be found on the web. See also section (3-39).
If you don't believe the disc is protected, then it might simply be dirty or scratched. You can try to clean the disc -- use a lint-free cloth, wiping from the center out -- or see section (7-12) for notes on scratch removal.
This is a situation where recording discs proceeds without difficulty, but the system hangs when you tell it to halt or restart. One possible culprit is anti-virus software. Try disabling it and see if the problem goes away.
When a CD player is playing a disc without any sort of anti-skip protection, it spins the disc at 1x, and attempts to correct whatever errors it gets. If it can't correct them, it does the best it can and keeps going.
When an anti-skip feature (such as Sony's "ESP") is in use, the disc is played at a faster speed (perhaps 2x), and when uncorrectable errors are encountered, the failed section is re-read.
CD-R discs are generally harder to read than pressed discs, so there is a greater likelihood of encountering uncorrectable errors. In some cases a player may get stuck re-reading a particular section, and the playback will have lots of skips and jumps as a result.
The skip protection feature can usually be turned off on portables. On car players you may have to find a brand of media that works better.
Make sure the software you're using supports Win2K. Don't assume that, just because it runs, everything will work correctly. You may need to update to a newer version.
If you're having trouble getting an ASPI layer installed, try the instructions at http://www.winchan.net/aspi/.
You may need to be running as an Administrator equivalent to record. The reasons for this aren't clear.
Installing Windows Media Player 7 in Win2K may mess up Easy CD Creator and DirectCD. One solution is to uninstall and reinstall both, and make sure ECDC is at 4.02c or later and DirectCD is at 3.01c or later. A simpler solution involves a registry fix. For a complete discussion of the problem, go to http://ask.adaptec.com/, and in the "Search all Products by Keyword or Article Number" section enter "000726-0003", click on "Article #", and press the "search" button.
IDE recorders may need to be the master device when used with ECDC under Win2K. If you are having trouble with an IDE recorder, and it's not set up as the secondary master, try configuring it that way.
Running ECDC v3.5c under Win2K is not recommended. If you want to try, read http://webcheckup.adaptec.com/ecdc-win2k/win2k-ECDC3.html.
FAQ Copyright © 2000 by Andy McFadden. All Rights Reserved.