Can't burn over 16x?

[Tim Z]

As a follow up to Joe's response at the CDR Burning thread where he says he has done successful burns at 25x, why won't Samp 6.04 allow me to select burns beyond 16x. I recently upgraded from a Panasonic SCSI 4x to a new LiteON 40/12/48 IDE burner. It gets recognized fine in both Samp and Wavelab, but in Samp I only get 8x, 9x, 12x & 16x as choices for burning speeds. I have tried 4 different brands of CDRs, all which allow burn speeds of 24x to 48x. Any ideas why I can't get anything higher than 16x and other s do? It's not that i am crazy for more speed, but rather would like to know why Samp is not offering me all speed selections?

Also, when I did a burn of one CD project, even though I selected 16x as my burn speed, I know it was burning slower at 8x or 4x. Yet I know the CPU was well below 10% for maximum burn. Anyone have this happen?

Cheers

Tim

[WireLine]

Same here...Samp 6.04, etc...My CDR is rated at 24X I believe, but my highest offering in Saqmp is 16X...

Ken M

[Joe Hannigan]

Yes, I've seen that "3 min" 25x burn time number come up, all the while KNOWING it was taking a lot longer than that! Heheheh...SOMEONE's fibbing on that! <G>

As for trying to get 25x out of a burner that's rated that high or better....have you tried the "Burning Troubleshooter" button in the CD Burn page of Sam24/96? I've used it a few times after new installs, and it found old or conflicting drivers, etc....removed them all and had less trouble aftewards. That sometimes helps, esp if you've already proven your drive WILL work that fast in your systeem.

Assuming there are other programs that came with the CDr drive (Ahead Nero is one of them) that will run diagnostics and tell you just how fast the machine runs, you can find out if it really WILL run that fast, independent of Samlitude's efforts. Try doing a CDrom at the fastest speed possible in your bundled CD burner software.

Other factors can come in to play: Are your HD's all set for DMA performance? (it's a box you need to check in Control Panel/device manager for each drive). Unless your HD is fast enough (7200 rpm at least, I supsect), with DMA activated (Dynamic Memory allocation), they might not be working fast enough to move the data out fast enough.
This box must be checked, or your drives simply wont work fast enough for that kind of 25x burn.

I have a D and E drive on one of my "burner" systems, and the D drive is DMA (EIDE)while the E drive is NOT (Pre-EIDE, I suppose)
For bigger files like 1.25 hr CDs etc., I clone/master copies onto one contiguous file on the "D" (Faster) drive. With no CPU load or DSP work going on, (Less than 5%) it's less taxing on the system, and it works.

I can then rip right through most burn cycles (using even a lowly P2-Pro, with 64 meg of ram) in about 3-4 minutes.

But again, your system may need to be tweaked to handle the faster speeds. Perhaps Sam24/96 is doing some 'behind' the sceens - pre-setting for the max burn speed, basing it on information it has gathered.

Hope some of that helps...

[Tim Z]

Hi Joe

Definitely not a HD or DMA setting issue. XP Pro defaults to DMA and I have two of the new 80 gig 7200 RPM 8 meg cache drives. No problems there. This is a Samplitude issue. I can burn at 40x in Nero, and 10x in Wavelab 3.0 (unfortunately Wavelab's max at that time). Today I did 4 more burns and timed them. I chose 16x, which for some unknown reason is the max Samp will allow me, and I am only getting 8x. This is very frustrating as I went through a lot of crap to get this 40x burner happening in my new system and all I get is an increase from 4x to 8x. This has to be some kind of issue between the LiteON and Samp. Anyone else use a LiteON with Samp and get faster burn speeds? This is a brand new system I just built with XP Pro and is tweaked for maximum DAW use. I'm stumped??

Ken what burner are you using? Are you actually getting 16x burns?

T

[This message has been edited by Tim Z (edited 07-19-2002).]

[WireLine]

Tim, my burner is an internal Maxor I believe...and as far as burning at 16X, I have tried it only once to copy a data file...worked OK...never tried the audio that fast

[Joe Hannigan]

Wow, I'm a bit stumped too.... Sure sounds like you have done a lot of investigating already.

FWIW: I have a QUE! CDr (25x) internal IDE drive, on a P-3 500mz Win98SE 256 ram system that's able to burn discs at 25x. (And it really DOES do 'em in about 3 minutes).

My other CDrs are:

QUE!CDr(firewire externaL)running off a firewire interface card on an older P2 machine for CD copies, and it's always trying to write faster than my HDs will feed it. So, buffer underruns are common, and I can rarely do much more than 8x safely on that machine anyway.

I also have the TDK veloCDr that "Claims" to do up to 24x speeds, but although Samplitude SAYS it's going that fast, that's the one that always seems to take a lot more time than it shows. The strange issue here is that TDK claims to have special "Fail-safe" features with this drive, and they claim it wont waste CDrs, ever, so maybe something else is going on in the background. So, I suspect the TDK drive is operating sometimes under the stated burn time, no matter WHAT the speed indicator says.

All in all though, my burn times are just a fraction of what they USED to be, and that's pretty cool.

Let me know if you ever DO solve it, I'd love to know what the deal was there....

[knightfly]

Hi Tim - I never saw any mention in this thread whether you have the latest CDR DLL downloaded - from the other comments it sounds like you're well past that, but you know what "Ass-U-Me" does for us - I'm thinking that an older DLL might recognize the brand but get some of the capabilities wrong - On a scale of 1 to 10, I'd give this about a "2" of being possible, but it sounds like you've tried everything else... Steve