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urban legend...
Authored by: danwarne on May 23, '01 07:20:00AM

I'm with Skab on this one. There's no 'rule of thumb' about what speed works best. It depends on how good your CD writer is, whether it has BURN-Proof, and your particular cd players. For example Sony CD players rarely play CD-R discs. This is a marketing decision by sony corporate to protect their music publlishing division and you can read more about it on Roxio and Sony's website.

Also the brand of media you use is critical. I have found imation, TDK and Kodak have given me flawless results. Go to CDMediaworld.com for 'the real story' on CD Media including precision tests with scientific testing equipment. They also have interesting info on the (very limited number of) CD-R Media manufacturers and the quality levels coming out of their factories across various brands.

Finally, I have a QPS Que!Fire Firewire 12x CDRW with a Plextor mechanism and I can successfully burn from Toast decoding MP3s realtime at 4x (on my G4-400 AGP), and the same with direct CD to CD copy. However this speed limitation is due to the speed of the source media not the drive or media itself. Go above that and you have to switch on BURN-Proof to cope with the buffer underruns. On the other hand, using good media, I can burn an audio CD from a CD Image on the hard drive no problems at 12x and it plays in my car CD player and 10 year old stereo's CD player.

IMHO iTunes is pretty cruddy when it comes to writing CDs, especially its ability to cope with background processes. Also it has to decode the MP3s to disk first which adds a lot of time whereas Toast writes MP3s directly as audio to the CD, 'decoding-on-the-fly'. Of course if you are bent on using OSX to burn your CDs then iTunes is your only option at the present moment. Roll on Toast 5 for OSX.

Kind regards
Dan



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