Another great thing that is coming out of the speed race is the price of the best, most bullet-proof burner on the market, the Plextor 12X10X32X Plexwriter has dropped below $200.00 and is headed down fast. I know, you can get a 16X10X40X Yamaha at BestBuy, when this was written, for $130.00 after rebate. I bought one eight months ago for $230.00 on sale. You don’t think that’s not a bitter pill. And due to slow updating of firmware and software, and a two year old computer, I have to burn at 12X anyway. For some strange reason, only Feurio (Ahead Software) will do a successful burn at 16X. At 12X, it takes six and a half minutes to burn an 80 minute audio CD. At 16X, it takes about five minutes. At 24X and with the new Oak Technology driver, it is “reported” to take a little over three and a half minutes. That’s smoken’! But is it worth the $300.00 for the fastest machine to shave a couple of minutes off the burn time? You probably will have to wait a few months for the software to support the faster speed and by then, the price will have dropped cause a new, faster burner has been announced.

Gonna be the first kid on the block to use Windows XP Professional operating system? The included Microsoft/Roxio CD burner engine included with the OS is reported do the job. Also, NTI CD-Maker 2000 Professional version 5.0.5 has been tested to work with XP. Don’t expect all the current software favorites to work with XP right out of the chute without some upgrading. This is a whole new ballgame.

Recordable disc alert — some knowledgeable folks in the industry are warning that the price of CD-R discs are going up (some think way up). The glut of last summer is over. The higher costs are blamed on consolidation of disc makers, high patent royalties (8.3 cents per disc to Sony, Phillips and Taiyo Yuden), and recent increased demand for better and cheaper burners (Sale of aftermarket burners, not counting system installs, grew 136% in Q1,2001 over Q1,2000). Back in 1998 and 1999, about 60 companies were producing discs with a capacity of 100 million discs a month per company. In 2000, demand for CD-R discs increased 84% to 3.27 billion discs. The projection for 2001 is 4.5 billion discs and the two main producers in Taiwan have already bumped their objective up over 5 billion. About 75% of CD-R/RW media is made in Taiwan. It appears the free (after rebate) disc offers of last year may have gone to computer heaven along with free internet access.

It appears, Macrovision, known for it’s video copy protection systems, is getting active in the music CD business. They have developed SafeAudio which is claimed to prevent a computer from copying an audio CD. The CDs with SafeAudio integrated have already been sold in California. If we try to burn a legal archive copy of our music CD with SafeAudio, the system will give “grossly erroneous values”, adding bursts of hiss to the audio signal. Also, the error correction codes on the CD, which normally correct these errors, are fooled and error correction fails. This leaves tiny gaps in the music that a music player fills in. A computer extracting or ripping the track to hard drive, will create an unuseable copy. Currently, the only work-around is to make an analog to digital copy using the sound card.

For the MP3 challenged, Thompson and Fraunhofer (the big dogs of MP3) have announced a new flavor of MP3, called MP3Pro. The new player is supposed to play current MP3s and MP3Pro, and the new encoder (ripper) will create near-CD quality digital music files in about half the disc space of current MP3. Log on to <www.rca.com> to check it out. The thought of almost 400 near CD quality music tracks on one CD staggers the imagination. How long before some Napster in-withdrawal-type puts 2,000 music tracks on a single sided DVD?

Burning tip of the month
When organizing for an audio CD burn, do it in two parts. First part, copy or extract all the music tracks to a work folder on your hard disk. Now is the time to reset the file properties (if necessary) and rename the wav tracks to the song titles. Listen to the music tracks to make sure you have a good copy. If there are pops and clicks, or distorted sound, it could be a dirty or scratched source CD, bad digital audio extraction, or copy guard. Clean the source CD with a little rubbing alcohol and a soft, clean cloth and try again. Use the alternate CD file system and Windows drag and drop procedure to see if that gives you a clean sounding music track. If creating wav files from analog sources, with the source volume set too high, the wav file sound will be distorted. A cheap sound card with a weak analog to digital converter will make all the tracks you just converted sound bad. Then run filters to remove record pops or tape hiss.

The second part is easy. Make sure your virus checker is off. Turn off Auto Insert Notification if you are using any software except Roxio Easy CD Creator and reboot. Open your burner software, insert a blank disc, point your software explorer window to the work folder you created above. Move all the music track WAV files to the setup window. Rearrange the files to the order you want them recorded. Set burn speed or test and burn if you are not sure, disc-at-once, and click burn. Now leave the machine alone till it finishes burning the new CD. If you get a buffer underrun, throw that disc away. Try the test at a slower speed until you get a successful test burn, then try the burn again at the slower speed. If that doesn’t work, join us at the Burner SIG meetings, 7 PM at the Resource Center, the 4^th Thursday of most months (check the calender in the PC Alamode). You’ll get lots of ideas on how to successfully burn CDs.

Alamo PC has also seen his other skills come forward with the move to the Computer Learning Center in Crossroads Mall, doing some highly skilled work and the finish work on the walls at the new location, skills learned during the years and had lived in military housing that always needed remodeling. Dale spent over 30 years in the Army as a helicopter pilot. He enjoyed the challenge of Army life, the variety of living places, and the foods of other cultures. He retired from the Army 14 years ago.