CDRLabs.com

Hey everyone.

Ok, I've been having this issue as of late (as in the past few months). I've got a Plextor 16X Re-writeable drive, and an AMD Athlon XP 1600+ with 512 Ram, 30 Gig 7200RPM HD, etc etc. Good, stable system.

Up until the past few months, I've alwas been able to burn audio CDs with Nero, no problems, and play them in my car. All my old CDs that were 650 Megabytes still work.

Now, with these new 700MB 48x CDs, sometimes the CDs will play, sometimes they won't. I've tried Sony, Maxell and Memorex, all to no avail, burning at 1x, 4x, 8x, and 12x. I even tried some 650 meg Sony's.... Most of the time the CD player will sit there seeking for like 5 minutes, then finally play the song, starting like 10 seconds in... it also takes forever to seek between tracks.

Trying to problem solve, I burnt CDs on my friend's burner, but the same thing still happens (seeking times take forever). Whats funny is that the older CDs that I burnt like two or three years ago at 16x STILL work no problem (even on shitty media like BASF), its just the newer CDRs that wont. Some of these new CDs also fucked up in a friend's car as well...

I'm guessing that the problem is between the "newer" type of dics and some sort of "new" coating they are using that older CD players can't recognise, compared to the "older" CDs back in the day of 8x-16x burners.

Can anyone shed some light on this? I read a similar post on this board about audio CDs not playing in their stereo and the person said they installed the VIA drivers (4-in-1s I'm assuming) and it fixed the problem... but how? Nero hasn't reporteed any errors after its done so I can only assume its the discs themselves, or my car stereo.... cuz the same discs play fine in my home theatre system.

Ideas?

Try some other media, like Fuji 48x. It could be that you just happened to try the wrong brands of new media. Imation also would probably work OK for you.

Edit: check out this post. Cfitz has a good point.

It sounds like your CD player doesn't recognize/support 80 minute media. What kind of CD player is it? How old is it?

Two more questions: Is your car stereo a factory head unit or an aftermanket head unit? (This may be answered by Ian's question above.) Since automotive interiors tend to be dust and dirt magnets, have you cleaned the laser on your head unit lately?

To extend cfitz' point (from the other thread) a bit: In my experience, I have found that factory head units are generally more picky about dye types (and media length) than aftermarket head units.

If your Plextor burner supports PlexTools' VariRec feature (and I'm not sure that it does), you may want to try changing the laser power on your next burn. alchip80 else recently mentioned here that VariRec worked for his son in that regard.

Ok, to answer these questions:

The car CD player is an Alpine CDE-7831, I bought it in 1998 or 99 I believe so I guess that makes it aftermarket.

Regarding the newer media, I mentioned in my post I also specifically burnt an audio disc on a Sony 650 Megabyte disc, and even this disc would not play. However, older 650 meg CDs that I burnt a year or two ago work fine.


And no I haven't cleaned the laser heads in my car stereo. I just bought a CD from the music store yesterday and it works perfectly fine, as does most of my older burnt CDs... its just these newer types that take forever to seek/play.

My Plextor is a PX-W1610A, I don't know if it supports that feature nor where I could find it. Could it be Nero thats the problem? Should I try EZ CD creator instead?

Also, can someone give me the rundown on the differences in coatings/dyes and what the effcets might be? Are Black coated CDs better? I'm not sure what the difference is between them all, maybe that might help.