What DVD burner should I buy?

superfastkyle

Junior Member
Dec 26, 2005
19
0
0
My toshiba laptop l25 came with a horrible dvd/cdrw drive, it doesnt seem to be compatable with many commands. Can't rip at specific speeds, spin-up commands don't seem to get it to really spin up. My rips start out at 4x and sometimes if I'm lucky they go up to 18x, which seems only to happen on my 4 year old cdr discs. Brand new pressed discs never go faster than 10x. When it encounters scratches, sometimes it will even go off to other tracks, or copy the first half of the song twice, or it just plain locks up. So what do you suggest for a burner either external or if not can you suggest a external usb case to go along with it.

any other suggestions for scratched discs would be nice
I'm currently using dmc audio for ripping, which seems to lock up more than others but seems to work the best (love the accuraterip feature more people need to use it though), also have used Rio Music Manager since I own a karma, and winamp which seems to get past the scratches that nothing else will (I rip only to flac, so built in flac is way more convenient)

Is there actually any good consumer repair device? I've bought one from best buy, lasted two weeks and then quit. Don't think it did much but get rid of the superficial scratches anyways. Right now I've been using a 4 sided nail file/polisher block and just using a circular motion with seems to work better than the repair device ever did.
 

Cerb

Elite Member
Aug 26, 2000
17,484
33
86
Lite-On.

Also, take the time to become One With EAC. Sometimes it can take a day or more on bad CDs, but I've only had one unrecoverable disc (bad scratch made by spinning on a CD tray, going about 90º around the disc) so far, as far as audible artifacts go (I haven't used AccurateRip long enough to say about bit-perfect copies).

Most any USB enclosure with NEC or Prolink chipsets aught to work fine.

For repair, plastic polish works good, but not good enough that you don't still need a nice drive.

I recently managed an example of this with NIN - TDS (which will not play in a normal CD player, it's so bad), in which a NEC 3540A gave audible artifacts after the polish being used, and reported no errors. My PC (812S), otherwise with the same setup (I set EAC up on both of them, and tested them), got several errors, and was slow, but only one track not accurately ripped, and whatever errors existed were not audible.