[Slowhand] Re: Extract and Burn

[Luke Pacholski]

AG, re:

>Fairly impressive ... how does THAT work?  Would be impossible on my
>equipment ... add 2 seconds after each of 10 tracks, so by the end of a
>disc the burner is 20 seconds off the source? Hard to pull off.

I thought it was strange myself!

One question about stand alone burners - do they preserve the 
pre-gap? Ie, when your CD player is counting *down* between songs. It 
seems like most discs I've gotten simply tack that on to the end of 
the previous song and have a gap/pause of 0. Of course, that seems to 
be true for many computer burns I've gotten too. I even think EAC 
does this by default, and even if you change the behavior, you still 
have to find out what method of checking gaps works with your 
equipment.

>Let's put it this way: you're spending your time (valuable to some of us),
>spending money on packing, shipping, postage, insurance, etc.
>Discs are the *cheapest* part of the equation and if you can't afford an
>extra dime or two for a blank, you probably need to reorganize your
>priorities!

My point is that what's the point of spending that extra dime or two? 
I just don't buy into the logic that those discs are inherently 
better. I've sent out hundreds (thousands?) of "cheapie" discs (the 
kind you get at BB, Sam's, etc), and I could probably count the 
number of problems I've had on one hand. A few of those seemed to be 
from one particular bad batch - something I haven't seen before or 
since.

>Valid in principle, and valid on say my main PC which is a stripped down
>lean mean machine designed for that sort of thing.  But take the average
>Joe's (or Jane's) PC, loaded down with tons of dreck, games, files, you have
>antivirus and firewall proggies polling, all sorts of TSR and background apps
>running, network connections polling, etc. and in practice it just plain does
>not work for most folks. This is changing as processor/HD/CD speeds improve
>but not everyone is using the newest stuff.  Sort of like where DVD still is
>today - if you want to do a raw AVI capture of a 20G-25G 2-hour DVD resolution
>file, you better be running a screaming machine/drives or you'll get 
>dropped frames.

Again...if the software you are using is worth *anything*, you'll 
either get a disc that's perfectly fine or a coaster (buffer 
underrun). If the data can't get to the burner fast enough, the 
burner shouldn't continue on. If somebody's computer isn't fast 
enough, I don't think they would keep burning discs that the software 
indicated failed. And *if* there's something wrong with the setup 
that errors *are* getting introduced, then it's pretty likely those 
errors will get introduced *anyway*, regardless of copying on the fly 
or not.

 From a "I don't want to waste blanks" standpoint, yeah, I'd say it's 
probably best to stay away from burning on the fly. But from a "I 
don't want to send bad discs out" standpoint, I don't think it makes 
much difference either way.

>For studio albums, surely - which let's face it for the average 
>chipmunk is ever
>going to be copying/listening.

But software can easily add silence between tracks, and it doesn't 
have to be 2 seconds.

Luke
-- 
http://lukpac.org/