It seems everyone got
a CD burner (
CD-RW )
for Christmas, and it also seems that people are making their
share of drink coasters, that is, burned CD’s that don’t
play at all, or don’t play in your home or car CD player, and end
up being used to keep water marks off the furniture. There are a
few basic principles that apply to every system that can help,
regardless of the particular burning program you’re using. Other
hardware setups do work, but I’m not recommending them at this
time, simply because most of the major burner manufacturers don’t
recommend them either. You’d know this if you read the manual
I will be addressing
a few issues here, making a few recommendations, and also giving
a few specifics pertaining to the three major programs that
people use with their burners.
,
Nero ,
and
CDRwin
. I know there are others, but the ideas are all the
same. For a more complete list,
here .
Hardware
Probably 99% of all burners are
IDE
devices. They hook up to the same cable type as your hard drive.
For those who are using externals, either
parallel
or
USB , or are
using
SCSI , read
the manual, I’m not going into detail about those setups here.
Most manufacturers recommend the burner be the
master drive
on the
secondary channel
. This can mess up drive letters if you’ve
got more than two other IDE devices (hard drives or
CD-ROM
’s, ZIP drives, or
LS-120
drives). My suggestion; Live with it. You can move
the removable drives to a different letter after you’ve installed
it. More on that later.
So why do we recommend the burner be secondary master? Two
reasons.
-
It allows for
faster, more reliable data tranfer from an image on your
hard drive. By far the most reliable way of burning. -
It allows for
faster, more reliable data transfer from your CD-ROM,
when doing CD copies. This is called “On the
fly” burning, because you don’t copy the data to
your hard drive first, although most programs have this
option, and it’s sometimes necessary.
Once it’s installed
correctly (double check the jumpers for master/slave
configuration), you may need to redetect devices in your
BIOS setup.
Each computer manufacturer is different. Some will need this
step, others won’t. I can’t tell you how to get into the BIOS of
your specific computer, but the best thing to do is just start
the computer, and open Explorer to see if the drive is there. If
it is, it’s time to install software. If it’s not, it’s time to
dig out the manuals for your computer.
A good test of your
new burner is to use it to install the software. It will read
CD’s just like any CD-ROM, so why not? Run the setup and install
your burner software.
If you’ve been scouring the ‘net
for
MP3 ’s,
you’ve probably got a folder or two full of songs you’d like to
play in your home or car stereo. Now’s the time to sort them.
Choose which songs you want on any one particular CD, make a
folder just to burn from, and copy them to that folder. The
folder should be on the fastest partition of your fastest hard
drive. In other words, if you’ve got a multiple partition hard
drive, make the folder on the last letter of that drive. eg. A
hard drive that has 3 partitions, will have the drive letters C,
D, and E. You should make your folder on E.
A 700MB (80 minute)
CDR
will hold between 10 and 15 songs, depending on length.
