Briefly, my problem is that I have burned a copy of Green Day’s “american idiot” CD from my CD-ROM to my DVD-R/RW burner on my Sony Vaio, but the CD only plays well in my DVD-R player. It sounds bad on my computer CD-ROM and all other CD players I own. Can anyone tell me what is going on?
I tried to copy the CD for use in my portable CD player…but the copy sounds scratchy on certain tracks–for example, #4- “Boulevard of Broken Dreams.” When playing it in my DVD-R on my computer, however, it sounds crystal clear. *So, I know it wasn’t the burn which failed. * ( I also burned it twice, once with Sony’s SonicStage, and agin with Veritas’ Record Now…same problem).
Another weird thing…the original CD does work in my CD-ROM, but when making an MP3 from it, I noticed the same problem. When I made an MP3 from my DVD-R drive, it was perfect.
My suggestion is that your CD-ROM drive doesn’t do Digital Audio Extraction very well. An astonishing number of them don’t. When you make a copy on-the-fly from one drive to another, there are bound to be all kinds of copy errors, sync failures and other stuff to get messed up. The reason why it works perfectly in your DVD player is because its error correction is working overtime to hide those errors.
The best way to make a backup of a CD is to use your DVD drive and not the CD-ROM to copy all the files to your hard drive, then take out the original and put a blank in, and make a new CD from the files on the HD.
Here’s the best freeware program for CD extraction: EAC
Have you tried a different ripping program like MusicMatch or etc (there are tons of them)? That should point to whether it’s a hardware or software (or program settings) based issue. That would be where I would start re diagnosing the problem before pulling and replacing the drive.
Fishbicycle is correct, I missed the part about you doing a direct CD to CD burn. Depending on the system resources and the drives some systems (even fast ones) can get a serious bellyache doing this. Rip to the hard drive first and see if that helps.
Thanks, fishbicycle, that must be it. My CD-ROM is a Samsung SC-140C, while the DVD burner is a Toshiba SD-R5002 model. I’m surprised that the CD ROM has such a crappy digital audio extraction routine, that not only CDs, but even MP3s, cannot be made from it successfully. I think that the fact that this is not a plain audio CD, but has other data on it, might also be exacerbating the problem, as other CDs have burned just fine. If I’m going to have to rip to the hard drive first, what is the point of even having the CD-ROM? My DVD burner must have great error correction.
You’re welcome! I don’t know what it is about CD-ROM drives, they seem to be universally poor at DAE. Maybe a $$$ Plextor would do it, but nowadays, who has any use for a drive that just reads data? CD and DVD writers are so far advanced from disk readers now that it doesn’t really make any sense to use a CD-ROM drive for anything. I don’t. I have a CDRW and a DVD-RW. They have never made a bad disc. That EAC software that I mentioned will, when properly configured with an mp3 codec, extract CDs and make mp3s of them with one click. It isn’t a problem for it to take the audio tracks from a multimedia disc, either. I agree, your DVD writer has TONS of error correction circuitry that is just nonexistent in any generic CD-ROM drive. I guess computer manufacturers have to supply you with something to read CDs, until you get a better drive. I imagine that eventually, all computers will come with writers instead.