Re: Off topic: CD-R

["J. R. Fox" jr_fox@xxxxxxxxxx]

Brian.Henderson@xxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

> YES! It was like night and day. I used Roxio for a couple of years,
> pretty consistently having at least 2 out of 5 CDs fail to read in
> any other player except the burner itself (and much of the time not
> even that one). I switched to Nero two months ago and not only has
> there not been a single failed CD, it burns them twice as fast! I
> had always heard complaints about Roxio and I wish I had dumped it a
> long time ago.

Patricia --

I emphatically agreee with Brian. Roxio bites. Direct CD screwed up
a number of Windoze systems I had to work on for awhile -- whether
they were W98, NT4 (the worst problems), or W2K -- to the point where
it had to be uninstalled completely. Nero 5.x is a vast improvement
. . . although if one does not venture past the Create CD Wizard, I
sort of preferred the design of the Roxio interface. Nero has some
sort of packet writing module as well (which does what Direct CD
did). I haven't messed with it much, because I tend to write whole
sessions to CD, usually amounting to at least 20 % of capacity, rather
than bothering with trying to use a CD as an on-the-fly, super
floppy. You can always revise the CD (structure; contents) between
these sessions, which replaces the TOC on the disk, at the cost of
some small space overhead. CD blanks being so cheap these days, if
the contents are truly vital, I will dupe AND revise to a fresh disk
in the same operation. This is cheap insurance against something
going disastrously wrong on your multisession original, which can
happen once in a while. However, I'm not aware of any problem reports
re the Nero packet writer.

There is another, very good alternative to the above two programs
(which can do a few tricks they can't) which I'll mention just for the
sake of completeness. It's called RSJ, from a company of the same
name in Germany. I've used their CD-program for OS/2 for years, and
they have it for Win-32 also. It costs quite a bit more than Roxio or
Nero, so I don't expect they have too many customers in this country.
(Their English-proficient tech support via email has been quite
helpful, in my experience.)

While we're at it, some consideration should be given to the
hardware. Whatever you get, it should have a decent sized buffer (the
standard has gone from 2 meg. to 4 meg., and today many better units
have an 8 meg. buffer *in hardware*), plus "Buffer Underrun"
technology, to greatly lesson the liklihood of burning beverage
coasters. If you're going to rely on CD-R / CD-RW at all, saving a
few bucks on the drive is likely not your best bet. I always liked
the Plextor line (first to offer the features I just mentioned), which
many considered to be the best. There should also be good models
available from Sony and several other manufacturers.

Hope this helps.

Jordan