recording 5 hours of webcast radio

[kozikowski]

<<<I've defragmented before>>>

If you do a lot of "production" like moving, changing, copying, deleting, or saving and exporting show material, the smoothness of the drive will fall apart pretty quickly, but if you have done this in recent memory, then no, it shouldn't take that long. The down side is you won't get a very big performance boost, either. People who start with a fragmented, jammed hard drive and produce a roomy clear one experience a sensation of buying a new computer.

<<<I used Real (not Pro) to burn it.>>>

So Real will work for you. I had a nasty experience with Real so I have none of their software.

Koz

[wayne9090]

Success! I'm listening to the CDs now. Thanks

[wayne9090]

I did have one problem develop, though it wasnt with Audacity. I burned CD's with Real, saving them as an audio CD (vs MP3 or data) that should be playable by any CD player (or so it said). They play fine on my CD players, but they would not play on a friend's CD player which is about 10 years old.

[steve]

They play fine on my CD players, but they would not play on a friend's CD player which is about 10 years old.

Not all CD players will play CDr's, though nearly all modern ones will. Also, some CD players are very fussy and will only play CDRs if they are perfect (in practice CDRs often contain a few minor errors, which most modern CD players will ignore or fix).

[kozikowski]

Try it again using top quality name-brand disks. My favorite is Sony.

Skittles and Biscuits Super High Quality CD-R blanks may cause too many errors in the dye layer.

Koz

[kozikowski]

That person who couldn't play your disks? That person is now your Quality Control Point. Buy them lunch. Reduce the burn speed and use higher quality blanks until your music works on their player. Never use "Burn At Maximum Speed." Ever.

Koz

[steve]

That person is now your Quality Control Point

Yes it can be useful to have a CD player that only plays perfect CDR's, but some old CD players will not play any CDR's even if they are perfect.

Reduce the burn speed and use higher quality blanks until your music works on their player. Never use "Burn At Maximum Speed." Ever.

This is only true of some CD writers. Burn quality is often / sometimes improved by burning at lower speeds. This is not always the case - my CD writers at work function most reliably at 48x (which is their maximum speed).

Which brand of CD you use can make a huge difference to the CD quality (not all CD's use the same dye and you will probably find that your CD writer works better with some CD's than others.

[wayne9090]

The CDs were Maxell CD-R. Now that I think about it I had this same problem once last summer, but the person was able to get it working on a different CD player. I'll reduce the burn speed to 20 since my max is 24 and that isnt going to slow me down too much anyway.

I also burned some on Maxell CD-R Music CDs, but havent tried giving those out yet. Unfortunately my Quality Control Person lives 25 miles away so the feedback loop is rather sluggish.