Hi Art,
Overall, I agree with the spirit of your statements
and had to comment on others. Otherwise, your
input obviously comes from experience, so I
thought I would share mine.

----- Original Message -----
Art Cassel wrote:


> 2) You WILL have problems with older CD players reading CD-R/RW disks.
> A rule of thumb is that anything below 24X is real iffy for reading
> copies and backups.

Not true. Newer doesn't always mean better. I have Sony, Panasonic,
and Hitachi drives less than 10x used in shuttles to restore customers'
pc's from  CD-R discs. Some of the (24x's or >) have such poor
optics, vibration buffering, etc. such as BTC, and Lite-On that I had
to reduce the read ahead buffering to get them to read a CD-R disc.

> 3) As CD's do not copy byte by byte, data may be lost at any speed.

Lower the speed, the better because less resources are required and
allows better resampling. Unless you do not meet the system requirements,
or have hardware/software/media problems you should always be able
to produce a good 1x disc. The bulk of the drive's cache will be used
for resambling instead of buffering speed.

> 5) I am comfortable backing up audio CD's for my car at 2X.  Data loss
> on audio appears to pass by with no perceptible problem.

Audio format is actually native to the D/A conversion process, whereas
data files pass through a integrated compiler first to create the packet
image.

> 7) Use your burner to read the image to the hard drive.  They tend to be
> more accurate than CD players.

The hard drive is better because it's access time is several times faster
and has larger cache support -hard & soft. If your player has a
large cache and faster access time than your recorder you should be fine.
For example; CD-R to CD-R works very well, but obviously expensive.

> 8) When using an IDE burner, use alt-cnt-del to shut down everything
> non-essential to your computer and that includes anti-virus, sound
> cards,etc..  Failing to do this will inevitably produce a fine
> collection of coasters to keep your coffee cups on.  You'll discover the
> pleasure of the buffer overrun GUI if you don't believe!

This is true on slower systems, or pc's with issues to resolve.

best regards -yui shin

                  Visit our website regularly for FAQs,
               articles, how-to's, tech tips and much more
                  http://nospin.com - http://nospin.org