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Does anyone have any experience with the audio-component CD recorders? I'm thinking of buying one. Everyone says, no, get a CD burner to put in your computer. The problem is that we don't have standard desktop/tower PCs; we have laptops. What I've seen of the CD burner market for laptops doesn't thrill me with joy. It looks like the RIAA royalty-paid blanks have fallen to a price level I can live with, and I don't expect the SCMS rubbish to be much of a problem. Right now I'm thinking about the Philips dual-CD model, which sells for about $450.
119 responses total.
Mu roomies has a modular for her laptop, and I know she really likes it. I can find out more info from her, though.
Ken: Although I don't have personal experience with one of those stand-alone component CD recorders, I have heard friends speak of them. I should think that if you can deal with SCMS, and the higher priced blanks, you will be fine. Here's a link the archives of the CD-R mailing list, in case you might want to try a search or two. There are several excellent external links from this page, too. http://cdr.navpoint.com/ There's also the CD-Recordable FAQ here http://www.fadden.com/cdrfaq/faq05.html#[5-12] Which has some links to articles about the Philips machines.
For $450 you can buy a used pentium system *and* a very, very decent CD-RW burner and probably still have $100 or so left over to spend on a stack of 150 or so blanks. Plus, you'd pay only about 20-30% as much for future blank media, *plus* you'd have the ability to burn other stuff to CD-R -- you could use it, for example, to back up files from your laptops every once in a while if you connect them via serial or parallel. You'll also have a much more flexible interface for making custom mix CDs.. I could go on and on about why you'd be better off with a PC-based CD-R or CD-RW system.. The music-only CD-R models fill a niche for consumers who aren't savvy enough to handle a PC-based system but otherwise they're not a very good deal. If you don't want to buy a separate used PC system just to dupe CDs and you can't think of any other use for it, you could connect an external CD-RW to your laptops using either SCSI or USB (I would suggest SCSI if you have room for an additional PC-card in your laptop..) The USB and SCSI CD-RW units are more expensive, though, and I suspect the laptop SCSI interfaces are less reliable -- as for USB, I've had enough troubles just using USB mice that I'd be pretty wary about using it to burn CDs, although the bandwidth is theoretically more than sufficient..
Re #3 - Best Buy is currently selling 50 cd spindles for $15.97 + s/h. I got 150 for less than $50.
I saw a really nice CD to CD Phillips recorder at Best Buy yesterday. It wasn't all that expensive. (Tho' I was still lusting after another mini-disc player/recorder, since I *hate* taking the small one to work, and I'd like a mini-disc/CD/cassette deck for there, since it is the easiest place to record music (at home, there's no where to really do it, even with the equipment, since *some people* (read: husband and kids) are always in the living room with the tv on, or playing their own music....)
re #4: sounds like a good deal if they work with your burner. for reasons I've never quite figured out, different CD-R burners seem to work best with different CD-R media..
re #6: They're Imation CD-R blanks, work at any speed from 1-12x. They seem to work on every burner I've tried them on (admittedly only 2)
i read that as "Imitation CD-R blanks" and started to wonder...
This whole issue got overturned again for us when Leslie got a digital camera for her birthday. Now it seems that burning CDs of photos will become a priority, so we may be back to trying to figure out how to stuff a tower-case PC into our overstuffed home. Sigh. If we go this route: what's the best soundcard for digitizing from analog sources such as LPs?
Best as in "best" or best as in "best reasonable-price consumer-market card"? High end sound equipment is something you can always drop a bundle on whether it connects to a computer or not..
Seriously, how about both answers?
Not only that, but I have found that making a qualitative choice in any sort of audio equipment requires a judgement call. Depending on the ears of the buyer, and the task at hand, you might not need to spend the big bucks on high-end equipment. In this case, I would suspect that you're looking for a card with a better than average analog-to-digital converter. I'm not up-to-date with the market anymore --- the last soundcard I bought was in 1999, when I upgraded to the Creative Soundblaster LIVE edition. (I should explaing that I have had 3 different soundcards in my 5-1/2 yr old Pentium desktop: the original ISA wavetable board, a low-end Turtle Beach DaytonaPCI, and the present LIVE) I can't be more pleased with the recording quality of this soundcard. I didn't realise when I upgraded that I would have a minidisc, or else I would have considered a soundcard with an optical digital output. I could still rig one, because the LIVE edition does have SPDIF digital capibility, but to tell the truth, I cannot tell any difference between the digital recordings I make at work, and the analog to digital recording I get from the Soundblaster. I am fortunate that the soundcard has two analog speaker outputs, for front and rear, so that I can record without unplugging the speakers. You will, of course, be using the LINE IN on the soundcard --- something I don't do very often.
re #11: I don't know either answer, actually, I just have a strong suspicion that there's a difference.. Someone who's a recording enthusiast or professional would be in a much better position to answer..
From what little I know, I'll say this: Pretty much any 16 bit sound card will do OK recordings. Hey, it *is* 16 bits after all. Where you have losses of sound quality is in the oft-neglected analog-to-digital conversion and especially in the analog input design. I'm not sure even the Soundblaster Live will do that great a job, being more ofa gaming card than a pro audio card. Companies that make serious audio cards include Yamaha, Echo (www.echoaudio.com), and probably others I'm too lazy to research. You might check out musician sites such as http://www.harmonycentral.com or http://www.sonicstate.com for reviews and such.
I'm helping a friend set up a digital recording studio. Proffesional quality 24 bit sound cards start at aruond 400 dollars and go up from there, they also include things you probably don't need like 8 channels of digital sound out etc. Any standard 16 bit consumer card should do fine for burning cds unless you are a real audiophile. My understnading is that 24 bits is only neccesarry if you are mixing multitrack sound it compensate for degredation in the mixing process, though obviously I dodn't know all the details as to why that happens.
The extra bits (typically 20 or 24) are to compensate for accumulated math rounding errors from digital processing.
re #16 Ah that makes sense, thanks. BTW I just got a cd-r 12X 10X 32X an off brand but I figured out it's Ricoh hardware. I really like it, but so far haven't had any luck getting it running under Linux (Mandrake 7.1) all the kernel modules seem to load OK but then I get a directory permission error even though I'm logged in as root. it works fine as a player underLinux and fine as a cd-r under windoze.
I'm going to have to renege on my "cheap sound cards are OK" assertion. I finally figured out mine is rather weak on the bass when recording the line in. I don't have exact numbers, but playing around with a test CD both on the line in and from directly ripped tracks showed the bass clearly weaker even at 63Hz. Bleah. I'll have to look for a somewhat better card before I can do any more vinyl-CD conversions from my rare LPs.
I was looking for an "external sound card" type of device which might allow me to make good LP recordings into the laptop via the USB port. The only product I find on the web is the Roland UA30 USB Audio Canvas Interface, for about $250. I'm not going to do anything about this until I get some experience with the USB CD burner I got, the Iomega Predator. Other than that, I found some reviews of high-end sound cards at: http://www.pcavtech.com/soundcards/compare/index.htm After reading reviews, I have this fantasy of building a PC for audio use around an Event Darla soundcard, or maybe a Gina.
I was poking around that site a bit today. Unfortunatly, no Linux support for the Event brand cards. I really don't want to have to use Windows for this stuff. Maybe one of those $100 Soundblaster Live! cards would do OK.
OK! Tonight we finally opened the Iomega external USB cd burner I bought in early March. The first attempt at making a CD seems to have worked flawlessly; I'm halfway through the playback of it now.
<does that "about-frickin-time" dance for Ken>
And, my third attempt to make a disc produced a coaster. :P How often should I expect this process to fail?
(and my fourth attempt... "Track Writer Error, Wait Failed." This one came close to the end of the disc; the previous failure happened on the first or second track.)
it depends, how fast are you writing, and buy cds in BULK
Try a slower write speed to start with, and avoid multi-tasking while burning. Once you get things working correctly it should be pretty much error free. I doubt you'll get a reliable full write speed using USB, though. And what version of Windows?
Sigh. Disc #2, although the program claimed to have written it successfully, also failed. So the score is: one good disc, followed by three failures. The sucessful disc was built on the assumption that the disc would only be 74 minutes long, although I have 80 minute media. I thought I had successfully converted Easy CD Creator to figure time on 80 minutes, but I guess that should be an area to look at. Everything so far has been written at 4x; I'll try dropping back to 2x. The media have all been 700mb/80min TDK discs; I have some Imation discs I suppose I could try. We're currently running the cd writer on a Windows ME (Millenium Edition) machine, though we'll be dropping back to a Windows 98 machine eventually. (The Windows ME machine is Leslie's travelling machine so it will be spending the summer in Europe.) One problem seems to be getting the screen savers to drop out -- there seem to be multiple levels of them. I'm trying not to multitask anything while writing the CD, but getting all the installed software to shut up is being a problem. CompUSA has 100 650mb/74min discs for $30, without boxes. Unless there's a cheap source for cases -- preferably the slimline ones -- this doesn't seem to be much savings, since eventually I want them in cases.
Cutting the speed from 4x to 2x, and getting the power management screen shutoff out of the way, has produced a second successful disc.
Check your BIOS for power saving stuff as well. WinME? Ick. I highly recommend Linux for CD burning, although on a laptop with a USB unit you'll probably have to wait a year for all the drivers to be common. You might also look into other CD software; Easy CD Creator has come under a lot of fire lately for general crappiness as well as a truly nasty system-destroying bug in a piece of bundled software (probably you didn't get it with the CD-burner pack edition, though).
I've heard about the Easy CD Creator system-killing bug; everything I've read indicates that it's a Windows 2000 issue, so I'm not going to worry about it. I've got MusicMatch software in the bundle which came with the Iomega CD writer, so I may eventually play with that.
The previous ten messages convince me, as if I didn't suspect it already, that home CD-burning is emphatically not worth the trouble. This prompts me to raise a vaguely related question, insofar as it discusses disks the same size as a CD. Is it normal for a DVD player to have trouble reading a perfectly OK DVD? I often have to put mine in my player several times and let the machine grind away unsuccessfully before it finally catches whatever it's trying to catch, after which it plays fine. This happens with most of my DVDs.
Home CD burning is quite worth the trouble, although I'll admit it took some time to figure out under Linux. There's some little story on The Register this morning about how the Easy CD Creator bug may indeed affect Win9x, although I didn't bother to read it. In any case, it's not directly with the CD software but with some kind of system recovery tool that installs from the same package if you leave the defaults on.
This is still with Easy CD Creator version 5, and (phew!) I'm hopefully-safely back with version 4.02d. David, this is fun! There's just a learning curve involved.
(This week I'm finally going to drag my ass over to the home-movie to video transfer place and get our old family movies done. They claim to be able to do digital formats, in which case I should be able to just burn copies for all the family members instead of doing crappy VCR-VCR copies. It's well worth the effort of setting up a CD burner when you start getting into applications like this. Then there's the 7 or so CDs worth of scanned family slides I did...)
News item: Gracenote, who have a database of CD titles and song tracks, has filed a lawsuit against Roxio, the makers of Easy CD Creator. Gracenote wanted money for all of the users of Easy CD Creator, after building its database as an open-source style project. Gracenote is claiming that Roxio's attempt to use a different CD database is a copyright infringement. Probably should keep the copyright issue in other items, but I thought I'd mention this item here since we were discussing Easy CD Creator. http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,2764843,00.html
I've never heard of the Easy CD Creator "system killer" bug (I seem to be growing increasingly out-of-touch..) but I've been experiencing frequent burn problems ever since I switched from my old machine to a newer machine into which I had installed a faster CD-RW unit bundled with Easy CD Creator software. My error rate has been so high with the new combination that I've pretty much decided to remove the relatively expensive "new" burner and switch back to my slower, but far more reliable, old one. My suspicion is that Easy CD Creator is the problem -- it seems like a terrible piece of software, but I'm not motivated enough to try and debug the combination thoroughly.. I have found that with all three of the CD-R or CD-RW units I've owned over the years that it makes a considerable difference what brand of blanks I buy. Between Office Depot, Office Max, and Staples I can generally find one of the office superstore chains that are selling blanks at some preposterously low price after rebate. At the moment I've got three or four 50-disc spindles of varying brands, none of which cost me more than $20 after rebate, and two of which were "free" (excluding sales tax and a stamp to mail in the rebate forms..)
It's not your learning curve I'm worried about so much, Ken, as the CD- burner's learning curve.
I'm only out $4 in "coasters" so far, and I buy expensive blanks at $1 each including the box. (And I still have the boxes!) I've now done three successful burns in a row; I will leave things set the way they are for now, but eventually I do want to see if I can go back up to 4x speed if I have the screen saver/power management stuff shut down.
Like I said ken, I have boxes from "the beginning" when I did that, 2 years ago, when you couldn't get cds on a spindle for cheaper. So I have a HUGE backlog of boxes. However, if you go to Best Buy or CompUSA, you can buy cases, slimlines are more for the $$ and you can get a lot for cheap. Trust me, it's worth it.
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