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(More customer reviews)These brush cleaner CD's do work, believe it or not. Perhaps not quite the same as having your system professionally serviced, but why waste more money than you may have to. This is a worthy investment to look into first - because these do work most of the time (and it's always a good idea to have one for continued preventative maintenance anyway). If you're getting play errors or severe skipping of your CD's, you might be amazed at how much one of these can help.
But here's a few tips for those of you making audio CD's on their home computers and having trouble playing them on some machines... It may not be a defective or dirty player at all.
First, it may be best to turn off any other programs you may have running in the background. This will give your CD burner full resources to do its burning job. Also, make sure your screensaver is turned off. If it starts up in the middle of a job, the laser burn may be interrupted and cause errors. So shut down all other programs and the screensaver too.
Second, it may do you well to defrag your hard drive before starting a burn. If you have a pretty fast PC, this may not be a big problem, but it may adversely affect the read data process if your computer has to search all over the hard drive to find pieces of the media files before burning them on the disk. I personally have an auto defrag program installed on my computer that runs constantly keeping my system running at its optimum.
Third, I recommend NOT copying CD's "on the fly" (in other words, directly from disk to disk). Copy the audio files to your hard drive first. Most CD burning software have a "create image" option - use that and then burn the image to a blank CD. If your using Nero, just turn off the "on the fly" option and the music files will copy to the hard disk first and then to the CD automatically. By-the-way, you may want to read my review on Amazon about Nero. It is, in my opinion, the best burning software available! Since I started using Nero, I do not know the meaning of the word "coaster" or "frisbee."
Fourth, ALWAYS burn CD's in DAO mode (Disc At Once). This will insure there is no gap between songs(TAO - Track At Once - usually leaves a 2 second gap between songs and causes the laser to have to stop burning momentarily between songs), but more importantly, using DAO will insure that the laser continues to burn constantly throughout the whole CD copying process.
Finally, and most importantly (in my opinion), make sure you don't burn CD's at anything faster than 12x! In fact, if you're playing CD's on an older system, burn the CD at 8x or even slower. If you still have trouble, take the speed all the way down to 1 or 2x. It can make a big difference. Yes, I know it means you won't be using the full potential of your zippy 52x burner, but you just have to figure out what is more important - fast burning or being able to actually listen to what your burning?
Most newer CD players have very little or no problem at all playing CD's burned on a computer at the highest speed; however, this is not often the case with much older units. As a general rule it is always better to burn audio disks slower.
You may also want to make sure you're using Audio CD certified media. That may help a little bit too. The brand of media may be a factor also. Sometimes the cheaper CD's may have a higher failure rate. I've heard this from some people. Personally, I have not had too much trouble with cheaper CD's... Usually, if the steps I have already mentioned are followed, cheap media will work fine. That has been my experience anyway. But different burners may be a factor as well and you may want to try some different brands of media until you find one that seems to work best for you. Using quality name brand media is probably a safe bet and may be your best course of action.
Good luck! :)
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