[Loveless]

I've been burning CDs for six years so I'll just share some of my thoughts and experiences..

re: generations of CD
You should be able to make 100 copies of a CD and the hundredth copy will still sound exactly the same as the first copy. If you try to copy a CD and it has a defect then you will see the message 'Data Verification Failed' when the burn has stopped! I always bin CDs that failed the data verification check, no matter what. In the bin straight away.


re: copying a show
I always do a straight CD-to-CD copy, I don't rip off the individual tracks as .wav first. If you're worried about buffer underruns, choose the 'Image Recorder' option in Nero, and it will make a dump of the entire contents of the source CD to the hard-drive first before writing to the destination CD.


I'm really really surprised to hear that people here aren't checking the MD5 files for verification of their downloads [img]smileys/smiley3.gif[/img] Do people not do CRC checks on their zip files either?

File corruption is rare but it does still happen on all types of media. If I had a penny for every corrupt floppy disk/CD I've seen people with... I used to own a Realtek RTL8029 network card years ago that used to corrupt files transfered across our LAN. We later discovered that the problem was caused by the Microsoft driver that installs by default. When we installed the proper Realtek driver, no file corruption.


One question I've wanted to ask for a while: Why do people not use ISO images to transfer the Damien shows ?
You would solve the problem of people inadvertently burning 2 seconds gaps between tracks, every CD would have the exact same volume label so you could download each shows details from the CDDB database.. the only reason I can think of is that there is better compression on the SHN files?

I know people *cough* who trade the latest betas versions of Windows and all the leaked releases are done through ISO format. there are other technical reasons behind this too (the fact that the CDs are bootable from DOS and must meet certain technical CD format requirements).


Anyway, people should really be checking all CDs that burn, especially data CDs. I've been archiving my collection of data CDs to DVD over the past few months and all but 1 out of several hundred CD's read successfully.

my poor lost Smashing Pumpkins documentaries [img]smileys/smiley19.gif[/img]