homemade music cd problem

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Just being polite...

Ah, that looks more like it!

Yeah, I suspected it might have been an excuse for Microsoft to whip out the handcuffs.
The last version of Windows I had much to do with (and that wasn't much) was XP.
And that's the way I likes it.

I'm a *nix zealot too! Though I installed win7 on my sons pc for his games. It's only bsod'ed twice in a month (no joke) so its obviously a major improvement over xp.

Just by way of weighing in on this:

I've had what sounds like the exact same problem. I've tried a range of different CDs from the cheapest to the dearest and none of them have behaved any differently. The problem has occurred on at least two different CD players ( one in my car and the other at a friend's home - where his own home-burned CDs play fine regardless of make of disc ). Admittedly it's not impossible for both CD players to be faulty, but since it would mean that they're both selectively faulty, it seems unlikely. I'm using Roxio to burn the discs, which I've always found in the past to be one of the better programmes, and which my son is also using ( the exact same version ) without incident. As far as I can tell ( and I'd be more than happy to be corrected ) this only leaves two basic possibilities: either the writer itself is faulty, or there's something about the burn speed that's causing the problem ( this hadn't occurred to me till I read this and other posts along similar lines ).

The writer itself is used in small bursts, but rarely; I might, for example, burn five or ten CDs on the trot, and then not use it for another two or three months - sometimes not that long, but the point is that it's sporadic use. In light of the fairly minimal amount of use that it has had, I'm loath to think that that's the culprit; it's about two years old, maybe two and a half, and I wouldn't have thought it would go bad in that space of time with such relatively minimal use? ( I know someone's going to ask whether it behaved itself at first, and the answer is that I can't be sure: (a) I honestly can't remember with enough accuracy for it to be useful, and (b) when I first had it I used to burn CDs with less tracks, so the problem didn't have a chance to show itself anyway ( I usually find it starts to make the noise somewhere between tracks 6 & 8, although it can vary ). By the by, I'm assuming that this in itself - the extent to which you approach maximum capacity for the disc - shouldn't create a problem as long as you're not exceeding maximum capacity, which surely the software wouldn't let you do anyway?

The only other possibly culprit seems to be the burn speed, but again, this is usually set automatically - and as has been said elsewhere, surely you shouldn't have to reduce the burn speed that substantially just to record a CD, should you?

I'm going to see if I can find a way to burn an identical CD to one of the ones that's misbehaving, using the same software but a different writer; not sure if I can arrange that or not, but I'll give it a go. Other than that, I welcome any thoughts on the subject.

Thanks, everyone.

There are several things that could be causing problems when burning an audio CD on your computer. It should be noted that unlike a data CD's, audio CD's do not have the error correction that the data CD's have, This is one of the reasons why a data CD only has a 650MB capacity as opposed to the actual raw capacity of the CD which is 814MB. This 20% overhead on a data CD allows the data CD to withstand up to 20% corruption and still recover the data. Audio CDs just record the raw audio data strait onto the disk itself without any error checking, they can get away with this because the sample rate is 44.1 kHz which gives a nyquest bandwidth of about 22.5 kHz which puts it in the ultrasonic range because the human ear can't hear anything above 20 kHz. So as long as the errors remains scattered and isolated across the recording, their completely inaudible, but as soon as you get two or more errors that are adjacent to each other in a row that's when you start hearing noises in the recording.

Some CDR recorders (and this goes for even the cheap ones as well as the expensive ones) may at some point during manufacturing inherit a bad laser diode. What this means is that the laser's power can decreased as a laser gets hot. So while you're burning a CD, it may be OK at the beginning but as it progresses on, it may start to get more and more errors because the burn will start to go bad from the laser not being able to maintain the proper power level to burn the disk thoroughly.