Subject:Problems Playing CDs Mastered in SF?

Posted by: Brooke

Date:7/11/2012 10:01:06 PM

I create over 100 spoken word CD masters a year. I switched from CD Architect to SF a number of years ago, based on Sony's Tech Support suggesting there was little reason for me to use CDA for my type of CD burning anymore.

After editing the program as a stereo .pca file (more compact and lossless than .wav), I use M for markers at logical sentence breaks (including the beginning and end of the program), then Edit: Regions List: Markers to Regions, then Edit: Track List: Create CD Tracks from Regions and finish by burning DAO at 8 or 16x in SF.

I've had one big problem since my dual Xeon workstation was stolen in 2008 and I upgraded to SF8 (then 9 and 10). The CDs I create seem to have skipping problems when played back on some PCs (most notably updated WinXP machines). Usually when this happens, a disc will start playing for a second or two, then start skipping through the rest of the tracks. It also means people can't download the files to their iPods.

This applies to both my original masters and the copies duplicated on my commercial 11 bay tower duplicator. They play back fine on dedicated audio players (decks, boomboxes, cars, etc.) and some PCs, but not all. This can be a bit of a problem when I'm turning out up to 3,000-5,000 copies of a disc, but I haven't been able to figure it out. By the same token, I don't replicate because I want the flexibility of running anywhere from 10-1,000 discs at a time, without a major commitment to a specific title.

I've had the same problem on multiple machines with a number of different burners running everything from WinXP to WinVistaPro and Win7Pro, but I never had this problem on my old machines running SF7 or earlier with Win2k (and the buggers stole my irreplaceable masters discs of Win2k, along with a year of my SF & Vegas work on my backup drives).

Since I haven't been able to locate it by searching the forums, does anyone else have this problem?

Subject:RE: Problems Playing CDs Mastered in SF?

Reply by: Brooke

Date:9/30/2012 3:57:40 PM

I'm sorry I wasn't very clear about my problem, but I haven't heard back from anyone in three months, and my largest event of the year is coming up this week.

I was wondering if I'm doing something wrong by mastering the way I've described below. I'm trying to offer CDs that people can also download electronically, like commercially replicated CDs, rather than including a separate mp3 disc with each album on the chance they want to play it on their iPod.

Sound Forge and CD Architect worked fine for this until the end of 2008, but I've had problems ever since mastering on multiple systems. Any thoughts?

Subject:RE: Problems Playing CDs Mastered in SF?

Reply by: Geoff_Wood

Date:10/1/2012 11:13:00 PM

CD Architect still works fine for me , and is my preferred CD mastering app.

You are burning your CD DAO in SF I assume .... (OK just checked OP - you are).

Media brand ? AV off while burning master ? Can you duplicate fault in a PC of yours ? Duplicator lasers getting tired ?

If your duplicator can read the discs, then the master would seem to be OK.

geoff