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Underground > Radio & Music >

CD burners - tech & questions..

13:10 / 10.05.02

So I fancy getting one of these terrific gadgets called "CD Burners". I'm moving into a house next year with a bunch of people who have sizable CD collections, and I could probably save myself (& them) quite a lot of money.

But, of course, I know next to nothing about the technology.

I take it one that plugs into a hi-fi is out (my hi-fi doesn't have any apare plug-ins for a start), so it'll be a computer one...

How gooder computer do you need? mine's a bit creaky .. I think it's got a soundcard, but it's so old and primitive I think it's made of stone, and I don't have any speakers.. will I need to upgrade it, and get some?

Does the Cd Burner work like a double-tape deck, copying stuff straight from the normal CD-Rom to the recordable one?

Or do you have to computerise the music (mp3s or whatever) in order to put it on CD?

What brand / model etc. do you think is the best value?

etc. all help appreiciated because, as you can see, I'm pretty clueless.

13:24 / 10.05.02

Computer speed doesn't matter too much, its the speed of both the burner and the drive you're copying from you should think about. I don't see why you'd need to grab some speakers, since you're just doing a straight copy of the CD.

Yes, a CD burner is like a double tape deck. You stick a CD into your normal drive, a recordable cd-rom into your burner, load up your software and go.

You shouldn't have to computerize the music first. Depends on the software.

Don't know about brands or whatever. Shop around, get one that's fairly fast and affordable.

13:28 / 10.05.02

Your timing on this thread is impeccable, as I am about to purchase myself one such device upon the morrow.

How gooder computer do you need? mine's a bit creaky .. I think it's got a soundcard, but it's so old and primitive I think it's made of stone, and I don't have any speakers.. will I need to upgrade it, and get some?

As far as I understand it, your PC doesn’t need to be particularly good – since you’re only dealing with simple streams of data here. The soundcard has absolutely nothing to do with it at all, as it just allows you to play the sounds.

Does the Cd Burner work like a double-tape deck, copying stuff straight from the normal CD-Rom to the recordable one?

As to the double-deck thing, you can either copy directly (always assuming you have both a CD drive and your CD Burner installed simultaneously), or you can copy the data to the hard-drive first, then assemble it onto the CD. To be fair, you don't actually require both drives these days, as nearly every CD Writer will also read without a problem.

do you have to computerise the music (mp3s or whatever) in order to put it on CD

Conventional CDs use .CDA (compact disc audio) format, not MP3. If you’re copying directly from one music CD to another, you won’t need to monkey around with the file format. If you’re converting PC music files for playback on a stereo, then yes, you’ll probably need to convert to a format the stereo can read.

What brand / model etc. do you think is the best value?

More on this tomorrow when I have furnished myself with said device, although a friend who builds PCs for a living has advised me that the quality of audio recording and playback now is so high you can pretty much go for a reasonably cheap CD burner and not suffer any hassles.

I’ll stick a reply on this thread tomorrow night and let you know the brand I bought and othjer relevant details…

13:36 / 10.05.02

cool. this sounds like it's going to be relatively easy..

though..

To be fair, you don't actually require both drives these days, as nearly every CD Writer will also read without a problem.

..at the risk of sounding foolish, how, in purely practical terms, can you make copies of a CD if you've only got one drive?

The Return Of Rothkoid

13:43 / 10.05.02

Easy. You record the CD to disk (making an 'image' of it). Then, you write that image to the drive.

Actually, if you've got a pretty shit computer, it's worth recording the CD to your computer first, then burning - the transfer rates your old clunker gets up mightn't be good enough for disc-to-burner copying. Additionally, it can have ropey quality concerns.

Bear in mind that if you want to make compile discs, not just carbon-copies, you're going to have to record to disc anyway, pretty much. You're going to need to make sure you have a decent amount of space available on your HD to do that - remember that a full CD is roughly 650-700MB of data. With more space needed, usually, just in case. Depending on how shitbox your computer is, trading in and upgrading to a PC with a burner attached might be the way to go.

You can get burners that work on hi-fis, but I think they're more expensive than computer ones. Computer ones of reasonable quality can be had for about £60. If you get an external one, it'll cost more, so make sure you know how to install an internal one yourself or know someone who can do it for you, otherwise you'll get gouged for a) installation or b) an external drive.

And stay away from Iomega's ZipCD drive. It's USB, which is kinda cool, but has some weird things happen to it on occasion, methinks. In my experience, anyway.

13:46 / 10.05.02

The burner reads the CD and stores the music on your hard-drive. You then put a blank CD into the burner, and write the data back again. Just saves you having to have two CD drives installed, plus frees up room inside the PC case.

Elijah, Freelance Rabbi

14:14 / 10.05.02

ok, heres how i do it
free up about 600-800 megs of HD space
copy the entire disk to your drive
insert the black CD---copy from the HD to the blank CD
This is the slower but "fool proof" way of doing it
with an older PC going from one deck to the other will likely lead to skipping or other quality loss

Now, as far as brands go, if your just doing music i would go with a TDK or HP burner, if you want to get into software TDK is still ok, but skip hp and consider a higher end (Plextor for examp.)

Wow, can you tell i used to work electronics retail?

14:22 / 10.05.02

Once you're set up, there's a very handy piece of software called CDEX which you can download free from the international web matrix (I'll try and find the URL for you later). It's small enough to fit on a floppy, so you can download from work or Uni if you have no international netrix web access at home.

What it does, right, is:

- converts cd audio files to wavs (direct from cd to your hard drive)
- converts cd audio files to mp3s
- converts wavs to mp3s
-converts mp3s to wavs

and so on. Very useful for compilations.

14:28 / 10.05.02

I use dBPowerAMP, which does pretty much the same thing as CDEX, but has some extra tools bolted on the side. you can download a free copy at:

http://www.dbpoweramp.com/dmc.htm

The Natural Way

14:39 / 10.05.02

Riz, welcome to a whole new world of big-theft fun.

Oh...the pleasure.

17:11 / 10.05.02

Right.

Get yourself a nice drive that comes with Nero. Nero is good. Nero is your friend.

You can copy disks on the fly - all you'll need is a quickish pc, and a drive that can read at twice the speed you're burning at. This may sound tough, but now that modern burners have little caches (known as BURNProof or similar), it's less creaky.

You don't even have to copy the data to the HD yourself, though, if you don't want to; simply uncheck the "copy on the fly" box and it rips the disk, burns it, and gets rid of the image file for you.

The BEST thing about Nero since version 5, though, is that if you create a new audio cd and drag a .m3u winamp playlist file (of at least 128k stereo mp3s, it won't do mono or less, you'll have to convert them manually)... it'll convert the playlist and as it burns it'll encode the files. That requires a relatively good pc - but by relatively, I'm still only talking pentium2. P2, about a gig of free hard disk in case, and you're away. I paid £88 about 9 months back for a 12x burner with Nero. It will disk-to-disk copy in 6 minutes. That's just silly. It's a TDK; great little burner, nice package. Plextor are good, though many friends have the 16x Mirai and say it's great. Hunt around for the best price.

CDex is also REALLY useful; pop in a disk, hit the CDDB button and it looks up the tracknames on the net, hit burn and it gives you a folder full of mp3s and a playlist file - can't say fairer than that for... oh, free.

And don't go near cheap hi-fi burners. The circa £500 cheap pro ones, the HHB et al are REALLY good, like, way better than a computer burner (it's hard to explain why, but I trust the people who'll tell you so); Phillips burners are DISGUSTING.

Any more questions, don't hesitate to ask...

18:31 / 10.05.02

I'd go the computer CD-R route with probably an internal Plextor drive. External cases will run $50 - $100 US so if you have an open drive bay it'll be better. They're relatively cheap, fast and of a high quality. My friend builds boxes occassionally and won't shake a stick at other drives.

Also I'd recommend having a CD player (portable with line out or a head unit) with MP3 reading capability (had one for the last year or two) if you plan on playing your music without a computer.

I use my computer as the playlist and "head unit" for most of my collection in MP3 format. I put most of the compilations I have on one or two CD's if I want music on the go and can listen to just about any track I want. You can get 5-10 times the amount of tracks via MP3 format depending on quality as opposed to .wav or .aiff for CD audio.

13:43 / 11.05.02

Ok, as per last posting have now puchased said CD pirateing thingy and have to admit I'm damned impressed.

I picked up an internal 'Exaclink' Nero5 Burning ROM (apprantly), which set me back £85. The thing will write at 32x, rewrite at 12x and read at 48x. Damned easy to install the hardware and Windows (98SE) recognised it and loaded up some drivers without any trouble. Software installation was similarly easy and the program itself is ridiculously simple to use in compiling CDs (no playing about with file formats as Nero5 does it all for you). I had my first audio CD burnt off and playing merrily away on my stereo within 10 minutes of installing the software.

The package also came with a whole batch of other - probably - handy stuff, which I'm still playing about with.

Tez is one happy little CD pirate...

22:52 / 11.05.02

Sofware-wise, I use Easy CD Creator. You'll probably be able to find someone at your university who'll give you a copy, Riz (or, indeed, a copy of any of the other programs listed here). Personally, I found it much more beginner-friendly than Nero and still use it now.

07:37 / 12.05.02

Hmn. It might have more magic wizards and things, but fact is, Nero just works. Really well. There are wizards in Nero, but I really don't think it's that tough - if you can use the windows explorer (dragging directory structures onto a blank cd) then you're pretty much set for backing up. If you can click copy, you can copy, and if you can drag mp3s, you've got an audio cd. Right-click for properties to sort out titles and track gaps. What's hard about that? It's all standard Windows UI.

There and again, all CD burning software is a much of a muchness. I like Nero because it's quick, simple, and very powerful at the roots; Easy CD is reportedly damn good, (more beginner-friendly, natch), and probably prints labels and inlays better than Nero. WinOnCD, though, is a bag of shit and you shouldn't go near it. You thought Nero was unintuitive? It has nothing on WinOnCD...