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.
CompUSA tends to creep me out, but they do seem to have the cheapest media (even if you buy a name-brand spindle instead of a shrinkwrap "too cheap even for a spindle" bundle of generic media). Plus you can find interesting orphaned computer stuff being sold off, like the touchpad mice I bought 3 of a few weeks ago.
CompUSA tends to creep me out too, but sometimes they're cheaper than Best Buy and just down the walk. I much preferred the one in Novi, until I began to know more than the sales staff, and I had to stop myself from correcting them in front of the customers. I don't like going somehwere and they don't know the difference between a Zip and the new 250 Zip...
resp:38 :: mission accomplished. With the power management and screen saver stuff switched off, I can reliably run the CD writer at 4x, which is its top rated speed. Now I'm fussing over between-track timings.
Ken, you sound a lot happier than you did before. Those initial posts came across as those of a deeply frustrated man.
True enjoyment requires suffering. :) On the subject of CompUSA and cheap media, has anybody actually tried one of those generic bundles of CD-R?
resp:44 - I'm 3/4 of the way down a stack of 100 of the generic CD-Rs at the moment. I actually counted the "coasters" last night, and I've made eight of the buggers, out of the 77 that I've used so far. A couple of these seemed to be poor quality in the media (weird distortions in the audio upon playback) but most were a result of my under-powered computer.
I'm looking for control of between-track spacing while recording as "disc-at-once." Mickey described a PAUSE column to me in the CD Layout window, but I don't seem to have that option. My Easy CD Creator is version "4.02d S45" copyright 1999.
I found a zdnet page saying that this feature comes with Easy CD Creator Deluxe, not with the OEM versions shipped with burners. How annoying. I certainly don't want to touch Version 5. I will need to come up with ten seconds of silence as a track, I guess, to insert between an album and the filler tracks.
There is no version 5, just 4....to my knowledge. What you could do, is find someone to loan your theirs or burn a copy of their cd for you to install...
(See above responses. Easy CD Creator Version 5 is reported to be a system-killer in Windows 2000 and to cause serious performance problems with Windows 9x, according to http://www.theregister.co.uk . The Register tends a bit towards yellow tech journalism, but I've seen the Windows 2000 story elsewhere. One might also look at http://www.roxio.com .) Mickey showed me how to create 15 seconds of silence with Windows Sound Recorder, and that's all that I need. I just like a few quiet moments between the end of an album, and the filler tracks I might stuff in at the end.
It took several attempts for a freind to make a CD for me on his own equipment. Found he also needed to turn off virus protection and isolate the machine to be more reliable. Something humorous about fiddleing with NERO to burn a CD-ROMe.
Well, poot. Disc-at-once does not preserve the between-track spacing on the source disc. I have a source disc which didn't leave any padding in the sound files, and the songs are practically colliding with each other on the recorded disc.
Look for the "cdrdao" program. I've got it on Linux, but I think there are versions for other programs. It lets you rip a CD to a big binary and then burn that back to CD-R for a copy with the spacing intact.
Like I said, Ken, I reccommend, if you can afford the space, to save things on your hard drive, make a format, save that, and then make cds off that. When I first began I did it, putting one cd in the drive that held one song, and flipping, and it was too much work. But it gives less errors, IMHO to do it all from the hard drive. no guesswork.
I'm not sure I understand how what Scott and ashke are describing differs from how Roxio/Adaptec CD Creator works. CD Creator builds an image of the CD in the windows\temp directory and then burns from that. The question seems to be, what are between-track pauses -- are they instructions in the Table of Contents to stop for a few seconds? I start to suspect that the gaps are not represented by a data stream with playing time, as they would be in an analog medium. If so, I can see where problems would develop, since if you are building a disc image one track at a time, from multiple source discs, then there would be no reason for the program to preserve between-track information from source disc Tables of Contents. I need to experiment and see if "CD Copier", part of the Adaptec/Roxio package, preserves between-track gaps. ~
CD Copier will copy a cd exactly. Mostly used for whole cd copies and <ahem> copying data cds. So yes, it does "preserve the between-track gaps". If you're making a cd from drifferent tracks, CD copier should automatically add a 2 second or so gap between items. I'll have to look it up and let you know...
My impression with Disc-at-Once (DAO) was that its entire purpose was to eliminate the 1-2 sec pause between tracks, which was the result of the laser physically stopping and starting again. I haven't noticed this issue, mostly because I rather like having one song start immediately after another. I'll have to check to see how this works with my version of EZ CDCreator. It seems unclear whether the software copies one large binary to the \temp when DAO is selected (as Scott says that this "cdrdao" program will), or if it copies each file as a separate .wav file and then merely instructs the laser not to stop during the burning process. I believe that the between-track pause is indeed a TOC entry, not a physically recorded blank space. Mostly, I use the DAO option in EZ CD because it is the only recording method that will save CD Text information, and I've found that very helpful for when I forget to label what the disc is and then it sits around for weeks. When I need to know what sort of obscurity is on the disc, I can put it back in the computer and get the information again. I wonder, do you notice the songs running together on the CD-Rs I've sent you? I'm 99% sure that all of those were recorded using disc-at-once ... especially the ones that began as mp3s, e.g. Luar Na Lurbre & Lais. Only once have I encountered a set of mp3s that had to be recorded without the gap between tracks, and that was because the original CD had been recorded in the same way. For clarification, ashke, were you saying that when making a CD-R from several CD sources, you find it helpful to copy each redbook audio track to a .wav file on your hard drive, and then direct EZ CD to those wave files for assembly onto CD-R? Ken, I've been listening to the 3 CD-Rs you sent me extensively over the past 26 hours, and I've found them of extremely good quality. You must be doing something right. ;-)
Converting a bunch of .wav files to a single binary would probably help a slower CPU keep up with a fast CD burner.
Yes, Mickey, thank you very much. That is what I was saying.
I had an annoying failure tonight. The story is too long to type in right now, but my best analysis of it is that I have a source disc which is just a wee bit off center, and this is causing read errors on the CD-R drive. The first copy has lots of staticy noise on tracks from this one CD, but not on tracks which came from a different CD. And the CD-R drive seems to vibrate excessively when the suspect CD is in it, and I have gotten the staticy noise intermittently when just playing the CD using Winamp, again only on this once CD. If I had time I might try to figure out how to take the disc spinning speed down to 1x. Only a mild annoyance, really, since this problem CD was just contributing filler tracks to the tunes I really wanted.
There's a Unix/Linux program called "cdparanoia" which is designed to work around that sort of problem by reading the data directly and cleaning up the data as needed. I just finished (well, not really finished, but read on) a vinyl-to-CD copy of Adrian Belew's "Twang Bar King". I use Linux, and on Linux use "yarec" to record and "snd" to trim the track files. The snd package isn't the most elegant thing in the world (maybe on it's native platform Solaris it is), so I have to follow certain steps to avoid problems when using it. One thing I have to do is click the "sync" option so that changes I make affect both left and right channels. I was wondering what would really happen if I missed doing that, and it turns out I found out on the currently-playing track on the test CD. The right and left channels are about 1.5 seconds out of sync. D'oh! Guess I have to re-record that track. I also think I need a subsonic filter for my turntable and preamp. Since the last vinyl copy I repatched things so that I'm getting my signal direct from the RIAA preamp without running through the rest of the receiver. What I'm seeing in the wave file editor is some inaudible low frequency stuff, perhaps footsteps through the concrete floor and other vibrations.
I'll vouch for cdparanoia as well. It's rendered a few of my "unplayable" CDs readable.
(Dammit, that's the second time in recent days I've misapplied the apostrophe in "it's". Getting sloppy...)
re #59: audio playback of a CD (in WinAmp or any other CD-player you might choose) is already at 1x speed.. So if you're experiencing problems playing that CD in WinAmp you can slow your CD-burning software down all you want but it's doubtful that that, by itself, will fix the problem.
resp:63 :: The playback is at 1x but the disc was definitely spinning at a much faster speed; I was hoping I could slow down the physical disc spinning speed, but I don't have any control over it. This is kind of a moot point now, since I no longer have access to the troublesome source CD. Scott in resp:60 :: I haven't thought about subsonic filters in years. I had a gorgeous active filter made by Nakamichi which was lost in The Great Stereo Burglary of 1982; after that I had passive filters, again from Nakamichi, until I moved to Ann Arbor. And now I don't think I have seen them since I moved; I haven't been playing vinyl much. I was starting to think about them just recently, while noting the low-frequency turntable stuff in the minidiscs I've been making from LPs recently.
I suspect a software-based filter on the music file would work pretty well. Now where can I find such a thing for Linux, I wonder?
Heh. Turns out to be the typical Linux story. I've already got an editor which will do low-cut filtering, if only I can figure out how to use it.
OK! I've finally found a Linux tool which will do a decent subsonic filter: ecasound! I tried a few other tools but couldn't get any of them to work quite right. Oh well, at least with open source I didn't have to pay anything for any of them, and I think ecasound must have been bundled with my Caldera distribution since it was already on my system. ecasound uses the usual tricky command-line way of doing things, probably quicker and easier once you've figured out the syntax but nasty if you just want to dabble in it. Anyway, here's the syntax for subsonic filtering of an existing sound file: ecasound -i infile.wav -o outfile.wav -efh:30 This does a 30Hz high-pass filter. I might up that to 40Hz before I'm done.
The rumors about Easy CD Creator 5 causing problems with Win2K systems? They're all true. I made the mistake of installing it on my Win2K system, and promptly discovered that it made the boot-up time go from 2 minutes to a somewhat frozen state (I later found out that if I had waited longer (I waited 10 minutes) it would have eventually booted). I found a website that said the way to fix this was to remove a certain .sys file by booting from the Windows cd and using "repair console mode". I removed the file, rebooted, and had to go to work. When I came back, the computer was sitting at it's logon screen, so I thought everything was working. Wrong. My cd drives (both the regular cd drive, and the burner) did not work at all. I am still working to see if I can fix the problem.
Well, here's an odd one. One of the CDs I made in a session yesterday starts clicking and popping on the last two tracks, beginning maybe 40 minutes into the disc. The clicks just sort of fade in; at first I thought they were the clicking of accordion keys. Curiously, I also had a failure previously recording the same source CD: the write process blew up with an error message reporting "failure to read TOC." (Why did the *write* process fail to *read* the TOC?) The second burn produced no error messages but I do have these annoying clicks. This was a 4x burn using the same TDK media I have been using all along. I suppose I'll try again at 1x tonight, maybe on a different brand of CDR blank.
Boom! I took another run at the source disc described in resp:68. Yesterday, try #1 failed while writing the TOC. Try #2 produced a disc with clickity-pops in the last two tracks. Tonight, on try #3, EZ CD Creator crashed while writing the TOC. The CD writer stopped and started several times on the Imation blank -- first one of those I've tried -- and then *splat*. Cool, I haven't crashed EZ CD before. I think I've got a early copy-protected CD from back in 1995. :)
Looks like the Imation discs are a problem all by themselves with my Iomega USB writer. The drive just refused to recognize a second Iomega blank, with a completely separate source disc; just kept spinning and stopping, with the message "Please insert a blank disc" on the screen. I took out the Imation blank and put in a TDK blank, and we were off and burning.
Wow ... I'm certainly glad that I don't have this much trouble making audio CDs. Since you mentioned your problem in party, I began to wonder what is the cause of these "clickity-pops" --- I have made a couple of these myself. There's some good information in the CDR FAQ in a couple of places: http://www.cdrfaq.org/faq03.html#S3-3 (How do I get rid of hisses and clicks on audio CDs?) and http://www.cdrfaq.org/faq04.html#S4-47 (Audio discs have crackling sounds on the last few tracks) In particular, I found the entire concept of seek sector or "jitter" errors very illuminating. I had always thought that "bits are bits" until I read a little more about digital audio extraction. Even two consecutive extractions of a track from CD can differ in the resulting .wav file, apparently. http://www.treworgy.com/cdr/test.html#dae My suggestions? If you have access to a regular CD-ROM, use it to extract the audio from CD. Listen to the resulting files before burning. Use another, more full-featured program to extract the audio. Exact Audio Copy looks good to try.
I've had very little problem with Imation media, myself.
Now linked to the restarted music conf. Oddly enough, pretty much all the technology discussed is still relevant, even though it's almost a year later.
Now linked twice to the restarted music conference! :)
Oops.
OK, done. Sorry about that...
Is anyone particularly happy with Easy CD Creator? I'm rarely happy with the CDs I've produced since I switched away from my older CD-RW drive to a newer combo drive (CD-RW & DVD-ROM) I can't decide whether the problems I've been having burning CDs have been a result of (a) the CD-RW drive I'm using, (b) the Adaptec software, or (c) Windows 2000. Actually, I suspect it's some sort of complicated interaction, as the results don't improve a great deal when I switch to another CD-RW drive and the performance using the Adaptec software was similarly crappy under Windows 98 (using either the old or the new drive..) At the same time, though, so many people are using Easy CD Creator that I have a hard time believing it could be solely responsible for all of the trouble I've been having. I'm going to move one of the CD-RW drives to my old Pentium system, which has Win95 installed, just to see whether the same drive's performance is notably different under a different OS. I'd planned to give the old computer away, but guess I'll be keeping it until I get the situation completely worked out. Does anyone want to offer advice on a foolproof software and hardware combo, assuming there is such a thing? I'm getting so tired of burning CDs with clicks and pops that I'm willing to more or less junk what I've got now and start over. I'll throw a reasonable money at this problem to make it go away if I can count on ending up with a system that flawlessly duplicates audio CDs while my machine is running Windows 2000.
Win95? Didn't you buy USB drives, and if so do you have the Win95 with the USB backport?
No, Ken's the one with a USB CD-RW drive. I won't even trust USB mice, after having innumerable USB peripheral problems at work. My first CD-R drive was SCSI, but SCSI's just too expensive for me these days. My other drives have all been EIDE.
Why don't you use the old SCSI?
Oops, sorry about that, Mike. I've had pretty solid success using Linux (Caldera 2.4 and now Red Hat 7.1) and the most popular CD programs (X-CD-Roast, cdrecord, and cdrdao). The latest X-CD-Roast is pretty good, although if I do anything more than once it's easier to write a script for cdrecord.
re #81: the original SCSI Ricoh CD-R drive I have is a single-speed drive. backing up a CD thus takes 40-70 minutes just to write the disc, during which time overtaxing the computer can cause an underflow in the CD-R drive's buffer, which is quite small compared to those found on current models..
That answers my question, but I didn't know that a SCSI drive is more expensive than a USB drive. (I have some interest in this as I have been backing-up my computer on CR-R with Retrospect Express, which adjusts its own write speed, and only doing a little direct archiving with Toast on a USB CD-R, where I have to simulate the burn first to be sure I wont get an overflow.)
SCSI peripherals are quite expensive these days, at least compared to (more or less) equivalent products that use a different interface. USB drives cost more than EIDE, it's true, but the price difference is largely accounted for by the fact that the external USB devices need a case (and power supply? I doubt they run off the power supplied by the bus); otherwise the USB interface adds only $10-20 to the cost. The least expensive SCSI drives I've found around here would cost at least $250, which is double to triple the cost of a same-speed EIDE drive..
It's true you can't get external SCSI devices for Macs anymore - have to opt for USB or firewire. Except I found a PCI board for my G4 that supports both SCSI and Serial - apparently it is quite popular for Apple users' legacy devices.
Well, since August I've been learning and using my new
PC and the CD burning software.
The Sony Vaio computer came with Prassi Primo 2.0, made
by Veritas Software as the CD burner. The CD burner is a
Pioneer that will burn up to 8x.
I installed EZ CD Creator, as that is what other people
have, and if I am to learn from them, It is something they know.
Found out that version 4 does not know about my CD burner (it's
to new), so I have version 5 installed.
The PC also came with Sonic Foundry Sound Forge XP 4.5 as
an editor (not the complete version, it only gives me 24 or so
free conversions to .mp3). A rather good editor. Shape fades
as one likes. Process selected or overal volume adjustments.
Fixes DC bias problems on demand. It's pitch control is in
musical terms, and I played with it some--I found a formula
to make it sound like a 33&1/3rd rpm is spinning at 45 rpm;
mostly by fiddling with things until the processed track came
out at the calculated percent. I found that it does read .mpg
(MPEG *video* files) and can leave me with a .wav file--that's
what I used to take the PC recorded 'A Tribute to Heroes'
concert and used it too make an audio CD for myself out of the
songs.
In putting together my (Halloween) Creepy Collection
(see recent item), I found the first compilation disc made up
of extracted CD cuts and line-in recorded tracks had some
clicks at track change time. Is there something in that a
.wav file should really be some multiple of 1/75th of a second?
if it is to be recorded to CD that has 75 frames (or sectors)
per second? I was wondering if that lack of a totally filled
frame might be giving me an end of track click, particularly if
the missing part is about 1/150th of a second? I got the click
when I recorded using Disk-At-Once using the Prassi software, but
did not when I used the Roxio software. Could it be filling in
the missing bits for me? Again using DAO, so that I may record
with CD-Text as the drives support that. (My new CD player for
the stereo system also shows the CD-Text, as does the Roxio
portable).
I also had fun with clicks and such during the song.
On one, I found the click in the .wav file. I don't know if
it came during the digital recording from the cassette tape, in
the original material. However, using the editor, I found out
I can put up with a two-thousands of a second hole more than
I can put up with a two-thousands of a second click.
I am having fun yet?
I'm having defective prodcut trauma with a CDRW I just received from Formac Electronic Inc. in Berkeley, CA. They want me to bear the cost of shipping it back to them for replacement when it arrived in damaged condition.
I discovered that the Sony 5 CD changer I got earlier this
year is capable of playing an audio disc burnt onto a CD-RW. Great!
Now I can make a test-listen CD before a final version.
The Roxio portable player also plays CD-RW discs.
Either the Iomega Predator USB drive, or the USB drivers on the laptop, have started malfunctioning badly. For a while the CD writing process would abort somewhere in writing the first track. I was blaming this on the Imation CD blanks I had switched to, and so I picked up some more TDK blanks, the ones I'd used with good success. Tonight, problems have worsened to the point that one does not even get around to putting a blank CD into the unit. On my first try, the CD-R drive would not recognize that it had a disk inserted, and after a reboot the computer does not recognize that it has the USB drive attached. I suppose we'll de-install and reinstall the software that came with the drive and see where we get. I've also now got a friend who bought one of these devices, so if he gets his up and working, then we can swap drives to on his machine to try to rule out hardware problems.
Hmm, this might be a good place to ask a question that's been on my back burner for years. My family has this (vinyl) record that is traditionally played at Christmas time, when decorating the tree. We've had this record for something like 30 years, and it's getting pretty gruesome. I've tried to find a newer copy of the music, but it seems to be a doomed effort. The record company that made it no longer exists (well, actually, a record company by the same name does exist, but seems to be a small seattle-based company specializing in bleeding-edge hip-hop. Probably not the same people), and no one seems to have any secondhand copies of the record kicking around. I did run across one reference to it, on the playlist for a late-night radio show on a Berkeley station in 2000, which might be worth tracking down if it turns out that our copy is too trashy to use. What I'd like to do, obviously, is get this music to a digital form. Ideally, I would run it through some kind of cleanup process to extract as much as possible of the original sound. The question then becomes, how do I go about doing this? I have no real knowledge of these matters. Are there professional services that could do this sort of thing for a non-astronomical price?
You might try the following websites who will convert LPs to CD: http://www.lp2cd.com (which appears to have been hacked at the moment, alas) http://www.vinyl2CD.com As far as guidelines for doing this yourself (which I have never done, nor have I experience with the above-listed companies) you might try the following sites: http://www.technocopia.com/read-20000206-cdfromlp.html http://homepages.nildram.co.uk/~abcomp/lp-cdr.htm#record I'm sure there are others with more direct experience in this.
I've transferred vinyl to CD, but not done cleanup aside from trimming. Greg, I'd be happy to at least get it onto a CD for you.
(Out of curiosity, what's the recording?)
I was going to say...the first step is reading the label.
A Children's Introduction to the Nutcracker Suite. Narrated by Captain Kangaroo. :)
If I record a CD (on a CD-RW this time) then re-extract those
tracks to .WAVs and record them again, am I getting any loss?
I am using this routine to use the volume Normalizer in
Audiograbber, as the Normalizer in Roxio EZ CD Creator seems to
add an additional DC bias to the .WAV file. (I can see DC bias
in the WAV editor, as the center of the wave being above the
center point/zero point of the viewer.) I also use the technique
to get .WAVs that are an even multiple of one CD audio frame long.
Fractional frames seem to leave a click at the begining or end of
a track.
After several months of total discouragement, we tried to start working with the Iomega Predator USB cd writer again. The first step tonight was to attempt the firmware upgrade which Iomega recommended for the unit. Unfortunately after the firmware upgrade, which by all appearances ran successfully, the CD writer is no longer recognized by windows, at all. We can't find any sign that it's connected to the computer. Uninstalling and reinstalling the supporting software doesn't seem to do any good. This is probably the last straw. We've wasted $300 and a year screwing around with this outstanding product; we got about 10-15 good CDs out of it in a brief period around May and June 2001, and that was it. Right now we're fighting the urge to smash it into pieces and ship it back to Iomega.
And another "early adopter" bites the dust.
Hah. Leslie went out today and bought a Plextor brand "Plexwriter." This appears to be a CD writer designed for tower case mounting, which has been stuffed into a a stand-alone case with a USB connector attached. $199, about 25% cheaper than the (*expletive deleted*) Iomega unit from last year. We have not yet tried making a music CD. However, Leslie dumped a bunch of photos to CD -- she has a year's worth of pictures piled on her laptop hard drive -- and it worked fine, first try. Since most of our failures with the Predator involved problems with getting the drive to accept the CD-R blanks, or getting the laptop to communicate with the drive, I regard it as a very good sign that these basic functions work with the new unit.
I doubt I'll ever waste my time by purchasing another non-Plextor CD burner in the future. My experiences with the Ricoh combo drive (DVD/CD-RW) I've got have been so frustrating and so time consuming that any money I saved by not buying a Plextor in the first place is insignificant compared to hassle, expense, and wasted time incurred.
Count me as another satisfied Plextor user.
Hope springs eternal in the human breast.
Steve Andre' had an amusing story for me this morning. He met someone
who had nothing but dismal failure using a Plextor USB CD writer,
and who is now a happy user of a Iomega Predator unit: the exact
opposite of the path we travelled.
The Plextor writer is built like a Soviet truck -- it's in a solid
steel case and weighs more than the laptop which drives it.
The Easy CD Creator 5 which came with the Plextor has a few odd
glitches. The two most annoying ones:
when reading from a CD, it does not tell you what track number
it's on.
we no longer seem to have control over where the temporary
disk copy goes, which is a problem because our C: drive is
crammed full. The program insists on using C: for a "copy CD"
function but seems smart enough to use D: (without giving us a
choice) for "music CD" creation.
At least this version of Easy CD 5 fixed the system-killer bug which
was discussed earlier...
The "utility" software which came packaged with the Plextor is
from a company called Oak. I haven't played with it yet, but Leslie
was able to turn some mp3 files back into CDs without any difficulty.
What are some good options for MP3 editing? Or does all editing
have to be done on files in the WAV format? I'm looking
for the most convenient ways to handle one-hour blocks of audio
recorded off the radio -- both for archiving, and to extract the
best bits for compilations.
I have an MP3 editor made by Data Becker. Found it at the store for something like $19 or $29. It does keep things in the MP3 format without going to intermediate wav format. I use it to get rid of the commercials at the end of radio show segments I get. Think I got it at Circuit City, as I have not seen it at other stores. It is crude, the fades are pre-programmed and the help text not edited by someone who speaks English as their first language, but it is there, worth the $19, I would consider it a rip-off if it was more expensive. Come over to test run it on something you have if you want.
The Iomega Predator in question has some odd problems; it seems to
be a one-off, most of Iomega's products, and most external CD-RW drives,
aren't that buggy.
A friend of mine did buy the Philips CD duplicator; he was unhappy
with it, since it was unable to burn at high speeds and made mixing
difficult, and since spent the money on a tower system with a burner.
We saw a product tonight which made it tough to resist an immediate purchase. The Creative Soundblaster people have an outboard USB sound card, the Extigy, for $150. This seems ideal for laptop users. Mickey told me about this a while ago and for some reason it did not fully register. It has lots of connectivity, including minidisc options.
(Ken, I'd be interested in playing with it a bit if you get one. My iBook doesn't have an audio in)
Bastard. Windows support only. Never mind.
So the new toy here is the Windows 2000 PC, a significant upgrade to a 1999-vintage Dell PIII 500 mhz machine which I acquired used. The chip is a bit slow, but it's loaded with memory and disk (or it will be loaded with disk when I get the replacement for the out-of-box -flaky drive from the manufacturer...) The relevant upgrade here is the USB 2.0 card, which makes the USB Plexwriter race along at quite acceptable speed. To write a 54 minute CD, the new rig took 4 minutes 40 seconds. I think that will be fast enough.
FWIW Plextor drives are held in high regard in the audio world.
resp:107 :: so we did buy the Extigy USB soundcard-like-thingy, and then it sat around for a year gathering dust. This weekend I hooked it up to see about making recordings from MiniDisc -- right now we are trying to make a CD of Leslie singing some songs, to send off as an audition disc for a program she wants to participate in. I need more gain! Mickey talked me through all the windows gain settings he knows about, and everything I can find on the Creative Extigy software is maxed out. I thought the recording level meters were broken, but I finally got them to flutter just a bit. So I need to figure out which will sound worse: raising the volume by about 300-400% in the digital editor (Creative WaveStudio), or patching in a tape deck to use its input amps to boost the signal. Come to think of it, I have a damn fine Nakamichi tape deck gathering dust in the basement....
I also need a better WAV file editor. The Extigy comes with Creative WaveStudio, but darned if I could figure out how to delete or divide a file with it. Still, it feels good to be making forward progress at last.
Sounds like you need a preamp...
I'm making a PC recording from Mini-Disc right now, myself.
(The Dementors concert from ConFusion 2003).
LIne in of the Vaio PC sound card is doing good enough, but
I do use a DJ mixing board to control volume. It goes into the
SoundForge XP sound editor from Sonic Foundry. The full suite
(which I don't have) can be an expense program. I think this editor
would be about $90 if you find it by itself. Very percise editing
is possible. I can shape fades (in and out) within whatever time
frame. By placing markers in a big file (such as taking in concert),
a double click to select between two markers allows me to copy and
paste to a new file. Which is what I will want to do on this one,
so I can have the tracks on the CD touch each other without
silence between the tracks.
It also has pitch control. But instead of me wanting to
make something double speed, I have to increase the pitch by
12 half steps of an octive. It thinks in music more than I
do. Swap tracks, mix to mono, volume changes, dynamic expansion,
and more stuff than I seem to be able to learn.
Hmm, I misremembered Tim's response above as an endorsement of Cool Edit, which is a product he doesn't mention at all. I'll have to look up SoundForge now.
I'll endorse Cool Edit Pro. It's an amazing program for $249. The noise removal algorithms are quite good, lots of other features, although a bit of a learning curve of you've not used similar editors. 30 day free trial at www.syntrillium.com I'm currently setting up a Linux box to try out a bunch of the Linux audio tools that have cropped up as of late....actually not so much cropped up as matured to the point of solid usability.
I'm definitely curious about Linux audio these days - I had put together a pretty nice set of programs to do basic stereo stuff (mostly moving vinyl to CD) but never took it any further.
I've got a list of 7 programs I want to play with: Audacity, Sweep, Ardour, Ecasound, Rosegarden(?), GNUSound, Rezound.
You have several choices: