Several months ago, I bought a CDR deck for my stereo system. I have a bunch of really old albums that’ll never be re-released on CD and it’s getting hard to find cartridges for my turntable. I got it home, hooked it up and plunked in a brand-new, fresh from the spindle CDRW. Didn’t work and the message code I got implied that no CDR was detected. “Hmmm…” thinks I, “maybe it doesn’t understand CDRWs”, and tried a CDR. It still wasn’t detected.
I returned the machine to electronics superstore which shall remain unnamed (let’s call it CircuitC or CC for convienience). The salesthing was a dolt (big surprise) who said I’d hooked it up wrong and the CDR Deck wasn’t getting any audio input (despite the No CDR detected message). Nope. Tried an old tape deck using the same config, worked fine. He finally exchanged the unit.
I tried again with the same non-results. I eventually got a refund on the unit (after another debate with the salesthing).
Anyway, I was recently in CC again. There, next to the CDR decks, were piles of special, vastly overpriced CDRs. They had a hyphenated name (like CDR-M, but I don’t remember the letter used). Anyway, a useful saleswoman told me that CDRs for CDR Decks had to have a special formatting done to them to work, which is why none of my previous attempts worked.
Now that I’ve got all the build-up done: Anyone know
A) What these “specially formatted” CDRs are called?
B) How the disks differ from normal CDRs (is it just formatting, or is there some sort of hardware difference or hardware protection?)
C) How (or if) I can format my inexpensive, but quite workable computer CDRs instead of being gouged for these horribly overpriced ones?
One aside, yes, I know I can record on my PC’s CDR. It’s not really an option for me.
Thanks!
Fenris