Hey all,

I've been having problems with my CD burner for a few weeks and I'm not sure what the problem could be.

I often use Roxio Easy CD Creator 5 (ugh!) to create music CDs - it makes it easier because it converts the mp3 files before burning and saves me converting them manually - but I've found lately that most if not all of my music CDs end up faulty, regardless of whether I set it to burn at 1x, 2x, 4x, 8x, 12x or 16x...

The first few songs always seem to work ok (except Track 1 which always skips a bit) and then as the CD progresses to around Track 10 and beyond the songs begin to skip at random intervals, my portable (and my friends Hi-Fi System) CD player will pack up on me and turn itself off (a trait which it usually does when it realises that it's "finished" playing unless I put it to repeat all) and generally makes listening to the CDs an audiably painful waste of time.

I've tried different media and while some tend to work a lot better than others I often still find that they all suffer in the end. Naturally my CD Burner's waranty ended at the end of September and like all hardware it only started showing symptoms after it had ended.

LG 16x12x40 CD Burner
Windows XP Pro
768Mb DDR333 Ram
Athlon XP 2000+ (1.67ghz)
Asus A7V8X Mainboard
GeForce FX 5900 Ultra 256Mb
2 Seagate Hard Drives (40gb and 30gb) set as C: and D: respectively

I cant think of anything other that a duffed burner as to why this is happening.

Thanks in advance for any help you guys can suggest,

//The yet-to-be-named Dwarf Paladin

It's odd that you're seeing this even when making 1x and 2x burnings. This is often a sign of "mediocre media at too high of speeds."

Have you changed media?

Do they play in other players? (It looks like you did...)

Sounds like your source I/O isn't keeping up, or is in some other way getting interrupted during the burn. I used to have that problem if I tried to burn at 44x from a network drive. As lame as it sounds, maybe try a defrag.

A defrag may have worked but I recently formatted my primary HDD (copied anything of value to my D: drive) and reinstalled a few basic programs before coming home for the weekend, so as far as a defrag goes it probably doesnt need it to my knowledge, but it's always worth a try.

The burning problems started before a format and continued after?

Is it happening just with a certain batch of media?

I'm not entirely sure, I listened to a CD that I burned today in my Dad's hi-fi (a Sony one which he's had for over 20 years) and it was fine. Guess it's a problem with my CD player and my friends Hi-Fi, I'll keep you posted.

what are you playing them in ?

some cd players dont read burned cds well.