Arggh!
I had my animated sales presentation all rendered, set up, burned into a CD, checked and double checked only to discover today that the companies CD ROM’s WON’T PLAY IT!!
Is there a patch I don’t know about? I there some way to record them so they will play on standard CD ROM’s? Are there any search word’s I should know about (I couldn’t find anything on C/NET or the web about this problem)?
Just saw this addressed on ZDTV…
It seems the RW discs are darker than regular CD’s. The laser’s in in plain CD players aren’t strong enough to read them. It should play in your puter though.
Hm. They don’t have newer DVD-ROM drives as their CD-ROM drives, do they? Some DVD drives (the newer ones with only one laser) have a hard time reading writable CD media. Not sure of the technical reason.
You might try a different brand of CD-R media; some players have an easier time with certain brands.
When I was working in service, I got this complaint very frequently when CRDs & CDRWs first came out. Many Standard CD players (especially auto & portable) that were manufactured more than two years ago just can’t cope.
Actually, you should be ok if you use CD-R instead of CD-RW. Give it a shot, and if you are going to be doing a lot of that type of thing, by a log of 100 CD-Rs. You can get them very cheap in bulk.
Make sure you have your CD burning software set to CD-R and not CD-RW. Only a re-writable CD burner (or a newer CD-ROM) can read CD-RW’s, and even then you usually have to have special software loaded on the other machine to read it (which should come with the CD-RW drive). I haven’t had a standard CD-ROM (or audio CD player) fail to read a CD-R disk provided it was recorded as a CD-R, although I’ve heard of it happening to others.
My software is very confusing about this- when you burn a CD, it gives you three choices- “make an audio CD”, “make a CD that acts like a drive letter”, or “make a CD for use in other computers”. The first is for audio CDs, the second is a CD-RW mode (which even works with a regular CD-R disk by marking previously written info as bad), and the third is regular CD-R mode- what you want to use.
Arjuna34
As Arjuna34 said there are three options with the Adaptec software.
The 2nd option which is the drive letter option can also be used for CD-R’s.
If you used that option, you will have to go back and have the software close it and convert it (write a TOC - table of contents )so that it can be read on other computers.
If the destination machine has an older CD-ROM drive, you may need to burn the CD as Level 1 (ISO LEVEL 1). And to be safe, close the session- you won’t be able to add future sessions to it, but it doesn’t sound like you planned on that anyway.
Arjuna34 gave you somewhat of a bum steer. The difference between CD-R and CD-RW is not which software option you choose, but is the physical media you put into the drive. CD-R and CD-RW disks themselves are different. With CD-RW, there is a smaller change in the laser intensity when it’s bouncing off a pit vs. bouncing off a land. With standard CDs and CD-Rs, there’s about a 90% difference between the detected laser bounce between pit and land. With CD-RWs, it’s much smaller, so the player needs to be designed to handle this. You can look for CD players with the “Multi-Read” label - these will play CD-RWs.
The Adaptec software does something different with the two, but that is automatically detected and you can’t choose which it does (other than by which media you put in).
If you’re going to use the CD-R to back up your files, but don’t care whether another computer without Adaptec’s software can read them, then you’ll want to use the DirectCD software, which makes the file system on the CD look like a drive letter. If you do this and then find that you want to take it to another computer, then you can just “close the session”, which writes a directory structure that can be read in standard CD-ROM drives. Closing the session adds about 15 or 20 MB to the space you’ve used, so it’s not something you want to do each time you use it.
On the other hand, if you’re making a data CD whose purpose is primarily to be used on other computers, then use Adaptec’s Easy CD Creator software. This doesn’t give you the convenience of mapping it as a disk drive, but it makes CDs that are fairly universal among PCs. If you want the CD to be read in other machines (unix or Mac - do they still make Macs?), then use Easy CD Creator and make sure the format is set to ISO-8660, and if you do this you’ll be limited to 8.3 file names.
Laser hardware issue on CD reader. Nothng you can do.
If you want to do belt and suspenders get a USB enabled external CDRW unit and install on office PC with USB port or have backup TFT notebook with 14" screen available.