homemade music cd problem

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Used to be able to burn music CD's from the I-tunes program in my computer of any length. Hour long disks with fifteen tracks- each track sounding great.

But lately when I burn playlists to CD's, though the first three or four tracks still sound great, around the fifth track you start hearinga a repititive fluttering sound in the background ( TICK-tic-tic-tic, TICK, tic, tic, tic) which gets progressively louder and ruins that and the rest of the tracks after it.

Any suggestions as to what to do about it?

Just a few random thoughts:
Does a shop-bought CD play Ok past the fifth track?
Have you recently changed the brand of CD you're using?
Could you try burning ten tracks but not using iTunes? (from a bunch of .wav files, say)
Try burning one track with a total length that's longer than five or more tracks. (wondering if the CD has some sort of position-related problem)

I do a little unpaid public access radio show.

I have burned disks with one track of an entire hour length ( edited versions of my hour long show). And lately I have the same problem that i have with hour long compilations of a dozen four minute songs.

The problem shows up when I play the homemade disks on players other than the computer itsself ( other computers, CD decks, car sound system).

I have several different brands of blank disks that I use. That might have smething to do with it.
But this problem has cropped up on atleast two different brands.

Do editing on my computer with sound studio, and then I move the files to I-tunes to burn them onto CD's.

I dont know that its possilble to burn a file to a CD directly from sound studio. Ill see if I can do that.

Since this is only happening lately, I'm currently thinking it's a CD writer failure, probably related to a focus or positioning problem.
If you try to play a disk you'd written some time ago that you know to be Ok - does that still play Ok on the machine used to create it?
Or even with a shop-bought CD. If there is some positioning problem with your CD drive then I'd expect the same problem to happen with any known-good disk.
(that said, I had a DVD drive fail here which would always write rubbish and failed to read DVDs successfully written months ago on the same drive - but it would read shop-bought DVDs perfectly)

That's useful - at least we now know it's caused by something happening during the write, and not simply due to some sort of reading problem.

That's good, because the problem now looks less likely to be caused by a specific brand of CD.

Or any CD writing software, really. There is probably a free one available irrespective of which OS you're using, if it turns out sound studio can't do it.

I agree and though I've never encountered this specific problem, when I have had burning issues with a writer, Slowing the max burn speed to say X2 has sometimes helped.

1. Having not read all the replies.... Does this happen during the ripping process (copying from CD) or during the burning process? Is it your master track (the CD) or the copy (MP3, or whatever format it's ripping to)? I did this with other software years ago. Took the time to listen to every track and found a few here and there that had minor "glitches." Original was fine, so I re-ripped the track and it was good.

2. Given the low cost of most CD-RW/DVD-RW drives, I'd not doubt the quality has gone done, and high-stress applications (ripping many CDs or burning a lot of media at one time) can tax the device.

I believe someone else suggested the drive could be going bad. That is a likely possibility. It does help to be sure the problem happens on any CD. I put a new CD-RW/DVD-R on a computer, and while it works fine, the problem CD kept having problems. I took it to my PC and could not play Track 1, looking at the CD surface, it was clear that somehow the original CD was burned improperly...there was a gap at the edge of the CD where nothing has ever been written, and that's where Track 1 should be. With iTunes, I don't doubt the error this creates dumps the ripping process. On a strict music player, the program just skipped the bad track and went to the next song.

CDs play from the central hole towards the outside edge. A single track would show as a narrow ring of slightly different surface reflection nearest the hole, and more tracks would expand this outwards.

Just now took a CD compilation that I made in this computer a year ago that works on other players,and tried it on this computer, and even the last tracks work fine.

About the buring rate: when I first learned to use the computer to make CD's a year or two ago the computer gave a message that the program was buring too fast.
So I checked out the preference and they were preset to the highest possible (24x). So I brought it down to like 8x. It worked fine ever since- until a couple days ago- when I got the same message again when trying to burn a cd. So went into preferences and brought it down to 4x. It was able to burn the CD, but it had this noise problem.

So notching the burning rate even lower( to 2x-as someone above suggested) might well cure the noise problem.
But it doesnt explain why the problem reappeared- why the computer suddenly cant handle the same burn rate it has handled for so long.

Maybe the computer just handle the same burning rate because Im doing more stuff with it than before, or its just getting old, or something.

Well, now we know it's something happening during the write process, that it's not a CD optics positioning problem, and probably not an optics focusing problem.
Progress!

This has two sections: the maximum speed the drive is capable of handling, then the writing speed of the media itself. The capabilities of the media is generally read from the CD by the burning software and it self-adjusts to accommodate so this "shouldn't" cause a problem.

Ooh no - if things have to be slowed down that much then something is horribly wrong.

I think that's unlikely if you just mean work generally, although it's a good idea to not have the machine pounding away with lots of other things while you're burning the CD.
The data flow to the CD while it's being written must not be interrupted otherwise you'll create a coaster, and a machine busy doing other things could cause that to happen. There is some buffering to lessen the effect of this but it's better to not have to rely on it.

Might it be a case of you running something else while you're burning the CD?
I'm thinking that the drive may be innocent and the problem is caused by some change in the way you're using the PC which is having a knock-on effect. Or, that there's been some update to iTunes that's causing problems.
This might help explain why it's been Ok until recently - it could still all be working Ok but your usage pattern while burning has changed.

Unless you're already certain, try a test burn with no other applications running at all.
Also, it's getting more relevant now to verify once and for all that the drive is definitely working correctly, including writing, so some other means of burning a CD which completely avoids iTunes would be very useful to nail this one.

Only had three audio related programs in my computer that I know of: I-tunes, Sound Studio, and Garageband. The last seems to have vanished from my list of apps.

Never found a use for garageband, but was always tripping over it.
Now that I wanna check it out I cant find it!

Its likely that I myself tossed it into the trash a couple years ago to free up memory (because it seemed useless).

I do alot of sound editing on sound studio but I always exported the finnished product to I-tunes to be put on a CD.

And just now checking out Sound Studio controls I dont see any other way. There does not seemed to be a way of sending the sound waves on sound studio directly onto a CD without going through another program like I-tunes.

So burning a CD on my computer has to involve I tunes.

Actually, there is something called "disk check".
Let me check that out.
Ill get back to you all.

Try:

http://www.google.com/m/url?client=ms-a ... Xtxm9W9tHg

It's the best free burning app for Windows.

Looks pretty good but I suspect naturalplastic is using a Mac, going by the application names and the binding to iTunes.
AFAIK both Vista and Win7 are provided with apps. to write CDs so the question of obtaining something else as a test probably wouldn't have arisen if this is Windows. Could be XP or earlier I guess, but I think it isn't even Microsoft.

Yes. Its a Mac 10.3.9

:p

Cornflake, you should know by now I never read posts correctly and make myself look stupid in the process.

Lmao!


I doubt there is even a win port of garageband as its developed by Apple.

Try burn its my favourite burning app for Osx.

http://www.google.com/m/url?client=ms-a ... MIkEbRFp9A

BTW audio burning in Windows is provided by wmp so its really no different from Osx using itunes.

:p