Trouble with recording onto CD-R discs

[AledJ]

My sister is a teacher and wanted to me to see if she could record a story on my pc and then onto a disc. So to test she could I recorded a 30 sec clip to test it, put a tesco cd-r disc I had just bought and burned the file onto it. When I then tried it on a cd player it did not work at all :| I then go over to her house with a mic and she records a small segment, burns it to TDK cd-r disc and it works on a cd player. I take one of the TDK cd-r disc and try it on my pc which then works on a cd player, but when I then try my cd-r disc from tesco..................nothing!!!!

Am i missing osmethign here? For some reason the cd-r discs made by TDK work fine, but the tesco cd-r do not work on cd-players :|

[AledJ]

So the tesco cd-r's work in my car very odd.

[deejayburnout]

What speed are you burning at? Have you tried burning them slower?

I find that the faster the speed, the more chance of 'issues' with play back.

I tend to burn CDs ( not that its very often ) and I burn them at X12 and so far no issues.

[Funkstar]

Was it just the one stand alone CD player you tried them with?

I would say it is just fussy about the dies used on the Tesco disks. Most car CD players are more like PC CD-ROMs, they read the disk faster than normal (like 4x real time) buffer the results heavily and play from the buffer, this prevents skipping when on British bad roads.

Moral of the story? Don't use cheap Tesco disks. I use so few CD-R and DVD-R disks these days (probably abut 3 in the past couple of years), the last time I bought any I splashed out on really good Verbatim disks. A few pence more per disk but well worth it to not have any problems what so ever. Gone are the days you needed to compromise on quality just to get a reasonable price.

[bazray]

Try burning a bit slower, if that doesn't work get some higher quality discs. Verbatims get my vote all the way, never had a coaster

[Diggah]

Different manufactures use different types of dyes in the making of the disc surface. Over many years as a digital video producer you start to learn the kinds of discs that are good and those that are bad. From what you've said I suspect that its simply poor dyes on the tesco discs.

Generally speaking you get what you pay for. The best consumer discs I found, were from Sony which I believe come from (or close to) the Taiyo Yuden manufacturer. FYI these are more pro end discs (with a price to match) but are generally recognised as some of the best in the world.

[Saracen]

....

Moral of the story? Don't use cheap Tesco disks. I use so few CD-R and DVD-R disks these days (probably abut 3 in the past couple of years), the last time I bought any I splashed out on really good Verbatim disks. A few pence more per disk but well worth it to not have any problems what so ever. Gone are the days you needed to compromise on quality just to get a reasonable price.

Ironically, when I used Verbatim disks, I had the worst failure rates of any I've tried. On the other hand, fairly cheap Intenso disks have been almost faultless. I go through about 500 a year.

[Lee H]

Don't forget to keep your firmwares on the drives updated as well.

They update the media codes contained within here to support newer versions of dies used in the production of the discs.

The best place to look for these updates that I've used all the time is the following site ;

http://www.cdrinfo.com/Sections/Firmware/Home.aspx

[Agent]

Ironically, when I used Verbatim disks, I had the worst failure rates of any I've tried.

Some Verbs started using CMC based dye a while back. It's a horrible dye. I had mass failure with Verbs too recently and couldn't figure out why until I Googled it - we're not alone.

The brand of disk isn't that important, it's the dye. Go with Taiyo Yuden or Riteks and you'll rarely have an issue. Not only that buy the cheaper dyes break down faster. I have disks here that are not even 2 years old and have been kept in a *perfect* environment, yet are unreadable.

The other difference I noticed when checking the write quality of the disks was the speed it was written at. It's going to be somewhat dependant on the drive, but I've always found writing at a lower speed better for a longevity of disks. I don't do a lot of writing these days though, so the additional time doesn't bother me.