CD-R skips - repeats .... why?

**Brangwen** · June 27th, 2002, 12:06 PM

Fellow Members:

Hope you all are enjoying this incredibly humid weather (if you live near me).

Question:

One of the CD-Rs I burned from downloaded MP3s would skip, or get stuck - repeating a musical note. I reburned the CD-R and it worked fine, along with many others I have burned that play fine. Recently a friend gave me a CD-R that she had burned: it played great first couple of times that I played it. Last evening it began to act up as described above. I thought it was something to do with planetary alignment ... so I tried it again this morning: same problem.

I don't know what my friend used (HW & SW). I used a Win98se OS on XP1900+ box, Roxio Platinum v.5.1, Plextor 16/40/10 (I think those are right Xs). I attributed my one crummy CD-R to a poor quality CD-R (a.k.a. lemon) or I had burned it faster than the CD-R was rated for.

I am playing my CD-Rs on a Sony MHC-NX1 magazine type 5 CD holder. Very nice / very new (to me) stereo in my office.

Why did the problem CD-Rs "happen?"

Thx. (Now back to work ... posting this was a nice - SHORT - break!)

Brangwen

**highrock** · August 20th, 2002, 04:14 PM

You won't always get a great quality mp3 by downloading it. Because some people are bad at audio extraction which makes the music crack, pop, skip you name it.

Her CD could be worn out from the heat you're having, but that's unlikely because I leave my burned CDs in the car, windows shut when it's like 97 degrees out. They still play fine.

My guess would be her audio extraction tools. She could be downloading mp3s also. When you P2P download everyone's got mostly the same file.

Burning CDs in trial and error. I keep burning until I am satisfied with the quality it puts out.

**Undeadlord** · August 20th, 2002, 04:18 PM

I always tell people to burn music CD's at 8x or less. Seems to elevate alot of problems. But thats just my expeirence.

Undeadlord

**Ruler2112** · September 6th, 2002, 02:44 AM

One thing that does affect how a CD plays is the humidity in the air. (You mentioned it was exceedingly humid, which is why I thought of this.) Every time it gets really humid here, my car player starts skipping and ejecting disks with error codes. I close the windows and turn on the air and everything's fine in under 2 minutes. I would imagine, just by the mechanics of how CD players work, that the humidity refracts the light from the laser, disrupting the flow of information. Try playing the CD in an air-conditioned environment, or wait until it gets better.

Poor sound quality is indicative of MP3s. Contrary to what many think and say, MP3 is not CD Quality. For proof, look at the frequency distribution for a wave, then the same tune encoded to MP3 and back. I have graphics on my web page under rule 2 of the ROIO section that illustrate if you don't want to do the frequency analysis yourself- http://cs.svsu.edu/~jswagner/roio.html

You might also want to convert to a 44100 16-bit stereo wave before burning, as your computer wouldn't have to do it on the fly as you're burning. (Although with an 1900+, you shouldn't have any problem.)