Burn baby burn - troubleshooting burning audio CDs

If you've never had problems burning CDs, please feel free to continue surfing past this blog entry and go somewhere else. Also buy a lottery ticket because you are a very lucky person.

To those still here and struggling, here's a link to a list of troubleshooting tips that might help solve the problems. While it says Apple and Mac all the way through the list, the solutions are equally as valid for working on the PC.

The biggest gottchas I have found is buying the wrong disk type for your drive and trying to burn too fast. I crank down my writing speed to a slow crawl. It takes a lot longer but I have a lot fewer drink coasters around the house. Also, if you're prompted, always specify Audio CD for playing in an audio player if that's what you want to do with the disk. And, if closing the disk is an option - select it - most players won't play disks that aren't closed.

I've also had problems with Vista burning a DVD of photos which is a data DVD. I haven't solved the problem in its entirety but I have found Windows Media Player is the best burning tool to use for the task. Simply create a burnlist of photos to burn to the disk. You will have to close the DVD if you plan to read it in a Windows XP machine but it does work.