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Burners!

Seth

23:05 / 02.01.06

My second techy question in a twenty-four hour period. I'm really stretching myself.

The internal CD drive in my laptop seems to be dying a slow death. It's fine with playing and ripping any properly produced shop-purchased CDs. However, it doesn't seem to like recognising blank CDs these days, which means I can't rip from a CDr or burn any music... apart from when the laptop is cold. Strange as it may sound, I might have as much as one or two CDs worth of leeway when I turn the laptop on before the drive warms up and discs are no longer recognised.

Forgive me if I've used totally the wrong terminology. I'm worse with computers than I am with storage heaters.

So, what's the problem? I've heard that the CD drives are the first thing to go on laptops. Can I just plug in an external CD burner into the USB socket? Are there any cheap burners that you might recommend?

Seth

23:15 / 02.01.06

OK, it's worked sufficiently this evening for me to rip i am the utterance of my name and burn Superwolf, with a period to cool down between the two. Small mercies. Seth needs more!

Seth

22:49 / 03.01.06

A very kind friend has loaned me her CD burner, which is working very happily with Easy CD Creator 5. However, iTunes doesn't recognise blank CDs, so how can I change my set up so I can burn to the external drive?

Mike Modular

22:52 / 03.01.06

Not sure if it's exactly the same on a PC, but:

iTunes>Preferences>Advanced>Burning

There should be an option to change the burner...

Seth

23:07 / 03.01.06

Interesting. It's now doing it with the external drive, too. Only now a message has cropped up: This is not a blank disc.

Thinking about it, this all started very shortly after I downloaded the new version of iTunes. I wonder whether there's any way to switch to an older version of the software?

Seth

23:14 / 03.01.06

So this seems to occur with iTunes and Windows Media, but not CD Creator, which is very slow but better than nothing. Any ideas?

Seth

23:35 / 03.01.06

Gah! It's infuriating.

I put the blank CD in the external drive. iTunes helpfully tells me it's a blank CD.

I put the blank CD in the internal drive. It does nothing.

So I call up CD Creator and it happily burns me the disc, which takes about fifty times longer than iTunes would.

As soon as the disc is finalised my laptop suddenly comes to life. It asks me what I would like to do with the disc in my external drive. Import it to iTunes, good sir? Or perhaps show the songs? Or play the audio CD?

Why does it not recognise the bugger when I first put it in the drive?

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