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- After having visited the local electronics store, I noticed the plummeting prices of CD-RW drives, some now less than $100. The cheaper ones are slower, but I’m not so concerned about that. I searched and found a couple other threads but they didn’t seem to directly/obviously address my questions here:
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- I want to store computer data and make music CD’s that will play in regular CD players. Can any CD-R drive do this? I have seen that DVD-RAM drives have five different formats and not all DVD-RAM drives can use all the formats; do CD-R drives all use the same formats? Can any CD-R drive use any CD-R format?
- I am aware of the difference between regular CD files and MP3’s, and that not all CD players can read MP3’s, but all the music on my PC is already stored as MP3’s. Can I store (or maybe I should say “expand”) the MP3’s as regular CD files onto a CD-R or not? I’ll be running it on a Win98 system (none of that Linux foolishness!) so any included software the drive ships with should work. Is this a commonly included software feature? - MC
I got mine for $70 after rebate(110 before). As long as they seem like a normal brand(mine’s Philips) and have the following minimum requirements, they are pretty much the same.
Reads at 32x
Writes at 8x
Re-writes at 4x
Anything better will cost more and I can tell you now that it takes about 9 minutes to burn a 75 minute cd. Not too bad, really.
In the sense that you mean it (compatibility), all CD-R drives are the same for burning CDs; some are also CD-RW, that is, they can burn rewritable CDs as well.
If you have good quality CD burning software, you can burn audio CDs using MP3 files as your source files. Adaptec Jam for the Macintosh, for example, does this. You must, of course, burn the CD as an audio CD (Jam ONLY does audio CDs), not as a data CD.
Some CD burning software is less able than others to burn CDs in all available formats. If you only want to burn audio CDs and Joliet (ISA 9660 + long file names for Windows) format data CDs, I’d imagine nearly any Windows software will do that much. If you need to be able to burn CDs that you can boot from, CDs that Unix users can make use of, CDs that Macintosh users can boot from, CDs that PC users with older Microsoft operating systems can use, hybrid (multiformat) CDs, video CDs, and so on, you need to make sure that the software package that’s bundled with the burner supports all those formats; or else plan on upgrading to / purchasing a better package later on.
MC may I recomend this
How silly of me, I meant this **
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There are “all the same” with respect to that fact that they will burn disks, however, some drives are more equal than others. Some differences between the top shelf brands and the brand X cheaper drives are build quality, reliability, noise during burning, the degree to which a variety of CD blank types and brands are tolerated and support for some of the more esoteric CD burning functions.
I recommend the top rated Plextor drives. I have had the 8X, 12X and now 16X IDE Plextors and not one has ever given me a moments trouble which I cannot say for Sonys, Ricohs, or HP’s.
Also, some older CDR drives may not be able to read CD-RW (and certainly won’t be able to write to them). Different drives also have different built in memory buffers. Some drives have 2 MB buffers, some have 4. As with sex, more is better.
There are also, rarely, issues of firmware that occasionally come up with certain manufacturers. Not to name names, but my ex-roommate had to get a firmware upgrade for his HP 8100 series burner in order for his burner to even recognize when there was a blank CD in the drive. :eek:
I’ve used a few brands, but my current favorite is Plextor, hands down. Awesome drives. I could actually pick my computer up and shake it as it’s burning and it wouldn’t skip (well, not really, but you get the idea).
All CD-RW drives are not created equally. Before you buy, search the web for reviews. When I was looking for a firewire drive for my Powerbook, a QPS drive was the front-runner because of its low price. Then I looked around a bit, and I found very few positive reviews and dozens of negative ones. The drive, it seems, would stop working for no apparent reason, and QPS tech support was almost impossible to get a hold of and even more difficult to get an RMA number from. So, no QPS drive for me.
Like the above, I’ve heard Plextor mechanisms are the best. I coulda gone for a Plextor, but instead I bought a Yamaha 12x10x32 that can do both firewire and USB, and I’m extremely happy with it. A whole CD burns in 5 minutes, oh yeah…
No, they are not the same. Look at third party software for them & you’ll see that the software is only compatible with certain drives.
As a matter of fact, I would venture to say its not the drive itself that matters the most its the software you can use with them.
Just as an update, with many of the latest, better quality drives coming with the “burnproof” technology built in cache buffers have fallen back to 2 megs or so for many of the latest 16X and 20X drives, as 4 megs is no longer necessary.
I prefer drives that continue to work three months after purchase. In other words, JVC sucks.
The funny thing is, it looks like it is writing, says it is writing, takes approx the right length of time to write, tells you it has completed the write function. Then, you look at the contents of the disk and what is on it? Not a damn thing. I got it to burn about 15 CD’s before it stopped functioning.
Moral of Story: spend the extra money and get something reliable. Yamaha and Sony come to mind.
Depending on the burning software used something very similar to this can happen if the default is to allow the software to “test write” a disk each time before the actual write, typically though, even if you leave this mode enabled you will get a prompt at the end of the “test” write to actually compelete the real write and complete the process so it’s likely you did have defective writer (or possibly software).
Any suggestions for Macs? I’m looking for one for my cube.
Andy, when I was researching my purchase, I read a lot of rave reviews of EZ-Quest Boa drives. Evidently, they work flawlessly right out of the box, and there’s no problem reaching their tech support people.
Because I was familiar with the company (I’ve bought drives from them for years) and got a good deal on a drive that handles both Firewire and USB, I got mine from APS Tech.
And for even more reading pleasure, I give you a host of drive reviews from the August 2001 Macworld. I was warned away from the QPS Que drives by all the negative user reviews I saw under a previous MacWorld article; even though MacWorld rated the QPS very high, it seems that real-world users ran into some absolutely godawful problems with their drives and with tech support.
Doh! Knew I forgot something…