Problems max speed burn CDA5.0 and Plextor 48x

eduardo wrote on 4/29/2003, 2:32 PM
Apparently I'm not the only one, but I will restate the case:

CDA5 will not succesfully burn at max speed with a Plextor 48x (IDE). The error message states "Buffer underrun problems".

The buffer will start to deplete as the drive hits speeds over 30x. Other apps burn just fine at max speed, hitting 48x towards the end of the burn. Same project, Disc-at-once, single long wave file, just one track, no FX or envelopes or anything to choke the system. CPU load for CDA hovers 5-9%, never more. The drives are either SCSI 160s or a new Serial ATA which seems even faster than the SCSIs. Best I can do reliably with CDA5 is 24x. 32x is iffy. Burn-Proof is not enabled, I can use it to force finsihing burns at high speed but it seems counterproductive as the constant stopping can't be good in a DAO situation. And it doesn't speed anything up.

Sonic, are you still looking into this? I hate to appear greedy (24x is still plenty fast) but I don't think it is unreasonable to expect the same performance as with other packages (Nero, Easy CD). Plextor is not exactly a marginal player in the burner arena - and it has been for years the brand of choice for Audio (and Video) professionals. Even Avid ships their megabuck workstations loaded with Plextor drives. It behooves SF to insure full functionality with these drives.

The Plextor burner has the latest firmware.

Please advise.

eduardo

Comments

eduardo wrote on 5/13/2003, 7:56 PM
Sonic, perhaps now under new ownership you can look into this problem... the error message is:

'ATAPI MMC Compatible'-(0)
'IdeChnDr'-(1)
-'PLEXTOR CD-R PX-W4824A 1.04'-(0)
Module atapimmc.cpp Line 1353
A medium error occurred.
The write operation was terminated due to buffer under run.

Status: 00020202
Command: 2a 00 00 00 65 ca 00 00 1a 00
Sense: 03 0c 09
Info: 00 00 66 62
Specific: 00 00 00
Extra: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00

************************************

PLEASE!!!!!!

Geoff_Wood wrote on 5/14/2003, 4:27 AM
You are being greedy, and unrealistic.

No burners burn audio sucessfully at 48x. I would not dream of attempting to try and burn audio at more than 8x, because of playback compatibility and quality issues.

If you insist on attempting this folly, you NEED to enable BURNProof. If you are wishing to burn at 48x (or 24, for that matter) , then quality clearly is not be a criteria, and BURNPROOF stopping/starting should not matter.

If there was an issue, SF would be looking at it under old ownership just as with new.


I siggest you do some internet study on audio CD burning. good areticles at www.cdfreaks.com amoungst otehr resources.

geoff
eduardo wrote on 5/14/2003, 7:58 PM
Using NERO, I've just burned an Audio CD, at 48x, disabling on purpose the PowerRec feature to force the write at 48x, disabling BurnProof, using standard issue Verbatim media. Complete Success.

The CD plays in all the cd players in the studio and edit rooms. I have routinely burned CDs at the highest rated speeds of the drives in question and never had problems attributable to this. The only consistent problems I've had burning CDs are recently with CDA5. Some people say that modern drives work better at or near their rated speed. I know it has worked for me.

SInce the mainstream CD burning apps seem to have no problem writing Audio CDs at higher speeds, I have to conclude that there is a problem with CDA. I am not talking about projects in which envelopes and plugins are used, I am talking burning from an image, which should be the pretty easy for the program to cope with.

There *is* an issue, as evidenced by the many people having similar problems and the same error message. SF may or may not be looking into this - it would be nice if they did say something. A change of ownership frequently changes things in a very drastic way, and I was hoping that maybe some of the financial uncertainties have been resolved and the folks at SF would have an easier time focusing on serving their customers.

I am not unaware of the many discussions on the topic. But CDA should be able to burn as fast as every other app in the same circumstances (even accepting a quality trade-off). Just finish the burn without depleting the buffer. Let me judge wether the resultant CD sounds good or not.

e
Geoff_Wood wrote on 5/15/2003, 5:51 AM
As you like. I've never had much luck writing audio at over 16x at all.

CDA is actually doing one hell of a lot more processing than apps that are merely writing the files to disc. Whether or not there is any SRC or plugins going on, there is still more/different processing overhead happening, which may or may not explain your 'problem'.

However, as I said before, if you are concerned with disc quality, you are not likely to be burning at much over 8x anyway, even some extremists still cling to the 1x theory. As CDA is geared to audio professionals, 'sounds OK to me' is not the criteria. The criteria is disc error rates and whether your production master is going to be rejected by the replicators. Unless something has changed recently, this is still related very much to burn speed and media type/quality....



geoff