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Re: Burning a Music CD
deniro #27285 11/04/13 09:40 PM
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The Red Book CD Digital Audio specification includes a bunch of restrictions about how a CD should be made. The specifications include:

1. The maximum length of a CD is 79 minutes;
2. There can be no more than 99 tracks on the CD;
3. The minimum length of the gap between songs is 2 seconds.

First generation CD players were rigorous about these restrictions and would reject a CD that didn't conform to the spec. Later, people started making CDs that violated the Red Book standard--for example, by including more than 99 tracks, or by having no gap between the songs. Modern CD players can cope with these just fine (there's no real reason WHY there has to be a 2-second gap between songs; there's no technical limitation on it; the engineers just put it into the spec for God knows what reason).

Some old CD players, like my parents' antique Radio Shack CD-1000 player, will spit out some of my CDs (I have a live concert CD that has no gap between songs, for instance).


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Re: Burning a Music CD
tacit #27350 11/09/13 07:56 PM
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1) Today I burned a store-bought CD (Sting, The Last Ship) onto a blank CD-R (TDK 74 min., years old) in my Mac. (AAC 320k). Both discs were clean and unscratched.

The freshly-burned CD would not play on my Marantz DR700. The drive just spun, showed "Reading," and nothing happened. Pressed play, nothing happened. "No disc."

But it did play on my Rotel DVD player. I can't help thinking I will have to buy a new CD player.

2) On the last four songs of the burned CD, there is a crackling sound similar to a needle on a dusty, vinyl record, so I'll have to try again.

I can't explain either of these problems.

3) I don't know if the blank was an "audio CD" or "data CD."

Last edited by deniro; 11/09/13 07:57 PM.
Re: Burning a Music CD
deniro #27351 11/09/13 09:31 PM
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There's no difference between an audio CD and a data CD. The only thing that separates them is audio CDs can be a little bit more expensive because a fee is paid to the Recording Industry Ass. of America for each sale.

Backstory: The RIAA, worried that people making their own CDs would ruin the music industry, lobbied Congress to pass a law saying that any device that could make an audio CD would have to be fitted with a bar code reader that would scan for a bar code printed on the inner edge of a CD and would refuse to make the CD if it wasn't marked as being an "audio CD." A fee would be paid to the RIAA for each sale of an audio CD, to help offset the losses by piracy.

The law never passed, but people still do sell "audio CDs" and "data CDs." They're the same.

Different brands of blank CD are quite different. Especially in older CD players, which used less powerful lasers that often have difficulty picking up the dye spots on a recordable CD. (My parent's old CD player I mentioned before is really fussy. The only brand of blank CD it will read reliably is Verbatim. I've tried Sony, Maxell, TDK, Kodak (do they still make blank CDs?) and Memorex, without luck.)

If the CD crackles, that might mean you originally ripped it as MP3 and then the computer ended up distracted by some other task while it was converting to CD audio and recording the disc, it might indicate a bad blank, or it might indicate a "buffer underrun"--some other task interfered while the CD was being burned and the computer couldn't feed data to the recorder fast enough. I generally close other apps when I'm recording a CD, or I record at less than the maximum speed of the recorder.


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Re: Burning a Music CD
tacit #27432 11/18/13 10:06 PM
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A guy at OfficeMax told me I might have more luck a blank CD-RW. Anything to that?

Last edited by deniro; 11/18/13 10:06 PM.
Re: Burning a Music CD
deniro #27434 11/18/13 10:42 PM
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Maybe? I've seen CD players refuse to read CD-RWs, but it's worth the experiment.


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Re: Burning a Music CD
deniro #27453 11/19/13 04:37 PM
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I haven't used CD-RWs for a long while, but when I did their failure to be read rate was a lot higher than CD-Rs or CD+Rs. I would be interested what your experience is now.


If we knew what it was we were doing, it wouldn't be called research, would it?

— Albert Einstein
Re: Burning a Music CD
deniro #27488 11/20/13 08:20 PM
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Originally Posted By: deniro
I have a CD that I bought ... that will not play on my Marantz CD player/burner in my home audio system. Won't play, won't read, just spins. The player is at least 10 years old. But the Fagen CD does play on my Mac. It is the only CD that will not play on the Marantz.


Just to add another anecdotal experience to the non-working pressed CD problem:

Many years ago I bought a copy of Natalie Merchant's Tigerlily CD in Massachusetts that played fine in my Onkyo CD player in my stereo system, but was not recognized by either my Quicksilver G4 tower or Powerbook's superdrives. Consequently, I could not rip it into iTunes.

Years later I was at a friend's house in Tucson and noticed she had the same CD in her collection. I tried it in my PowerBook and it read and ripped just fine.

You know how the bottom surface of an audio CD will have a diffraction pattern of some sort that often shifts when you tilt the disc? Comparing the two discs, I noticed that my problem CD had a very faint pattern with no shifting visible, while my friend's CD had a very apparent pattern with the usual shifting rainbow effect as it was tilted in the light. So obviously the pressings were different.

Whether pressed or home burned, if a CD's physical characteristics fall outside the tolerances of a particular player it won't be recognized. Exactly what factors cause these variations and why are subjects for more learned folks than I.

I just realized that I have never tried that CD in my MacBook Pro; when I get home next week I'll give it a spin and see if it reads.


MacBook Pro, 2.66 Ghz Intel Core i7, 4GB RAM, 500 GB HD, OSX 10.6.8
Re: Burning a Music CD
bob82xrp #31177 09/13/14 01:32 AM
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I was surprised to see someone comment that they burned AIFF files onto a blank CD-R. How many songs would fit? Five?

For anyone interested in doing A/B tests, there is a free program called ABXTester.


Re: Burning a Music CD
deniro #31180 09/13/14 04:03 AM
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It's tricky when you talk about burning a file format to a CD. If you burn an audio CD, it doesn't matter if you start from MP3 or AIFF or what have you--the result is an Orange Book CD, the files are decoded and converted to CD format.

The simplest AIFF files are uncompressed 16-bit, 44.1 kHz sound--basically, the same thing you'll see on a CD. So an AIFF file is going to be very close in size to the size of the data recorded on the CD. Audio CDs don't really have "files" per se--the directory structure is way more primitive than that. They have a simple table of contents that show how many bytes in the start of each song is, followed by nothing but a stream of bytes representing 16-bit 44.1 kHz stereo sound.


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