Picking out a CDR machine

Posted by rabident [IP: 192.91.146.34] on September 28, 1999 at 14:21:15
Using Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 4.01; Windows NT):

In Reply to: Picking out a CDR machine posted by Nigel Pond [SysOp] on September 09, 1999 at 08:49:00

You don't need a sound card to copy a CD to a CDR on a computer. What you want to do is called Digital Audio Extraction. Using free software or the software that comes with your CDR drive, the computer can pull the data right off the disc. This can be buffered to the hard drive (required if you have a slow computer or are using your writer to first read the data), or send directly to the CDR (if you have a seperate reader and writer). It's digital all the way and doesn't use the sound card at all.

If all you want to do is create CDR discs, you can use any old computer down to a Pentium 200 with 32MB of RAM. You should be able to pick one of those up real cheap if you don't already have one. A basic CDR or CDRW drive with the required software will cost you around $200 retail.

Most CDR and CDRW drives are IDE. They're not the fastest and with an old computer, you might have to use the hard drive as a buffer, but they're by far the easiest to setup and the least expensive.

As a plus, the software that does DAE doesn't care about SCMS. I've copied a copied CDR before.

Also, I'm not sure how fast the non-computer based recorders copy. The speed is generally held back by the writer. Right now you can get CD recorders that will write CD-R discs at 12x normal speed (ie 6 minutes to copy an entire full CD), and CD-RW discs at 8x.

If you already have a computer, I'd recomend a CD-RW drive. And no one will argue that Plextor is the best for DAE. It has in hardware correction for the subtle jitter timing problems that can occur with a CD transport.

Btw, I wouldn't be suprised if the guts of the dedicated recorders actually contained a single board computer. You can get them for less than $100 and they include an LCD interface, ATAPI drive interface, and a FLASH memory for program storage. Slap a low cost LCD display and a 2x CD-RW drive in a nice package, using the on board parallel interface for user input, and you've got yourself a dedicated CD recorder for under $300.

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