Burning CDs

Metropolis wrote: So I guess all that "info" in his profile is bull then?

Username:	Reed Lover
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Real Name:	Don Deluago Di Nascimento
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Location:	Sao Tome and Principe
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Great homepage and occupation Metropolis

Wow, Reed. You're a Urine Extractor and you don't even use your hands... You must be popular.

I also have a hi-fi cd recoder and agree with Reed Lover of the sound qualty of both types of cd-r. I don't think a computer-burnt cd pays as well or sounds as good.

I don't tend to burn full Cds , because I would rather own the real thing . As a matter of fact I have bought the vynil, the first cd edition and the re-mastered (mini Lp) edition of Nursery Cryme but got rid of the first cd as a gift to someone who did not know it(and now loves Genesis) .

However I burn Cds from vinyls that are not available as such (Maneige or many other Quebec prog yet still only in vinyl) .

I also burn Cds of stuff I will never buy and for example make compilation of mid 70's Santana albums because only two or three tracks are worthy of keeping so I gather them up on one compilation. Of course , those cds copied come from friends , libraries or my own copy which I get rid of once in the compilation. this liberates shelf space but is generally not financially rewarding because used cds are too low prices.

Rare and difficult to find (and often tooooo expensive) can also pass on my recorder.

But I do have over seven hundred legal cds as well as have bought a few thousands vinyls (sometimes used), so I consider myself having paid muy dues to the recording industry.

There's no difference between a copied CD and a bought one - you're simply transferring 1s and 0s, so there cannot be, if you burn uncompressed audio data.

As soon as you start to encode to mp3 or wma, then your music loses quality, as all compression algorithms are lossy to some extent.

I burn CDs of the vinyl I buy so that I can listen to it at work (I don't get much of a chance at home). There is a HUGE difference between a first press vinyl LP and a CD, however. Digital recordings are accurate, but not the same as analogue recordings in the same way that digital pictures are accurate - but you can usually tell that they're digital if you look hard enough (play "spot the artefact").

It's OK for aural wallpaper at work tho' - and it means I don't overplay the plastic!

There is enivitably some loss of information when the Cd is copied.

How little depends on the quality of the components used.

Jim Garten wrote: Certif1ed wrote: I burn CDs of the vinyl I buy so that I can listen to it at work (I don't get much of a chance at home). There is a HUGE difference between a first press vinyl LP and a CD, however. Digital recordings are accurate, but not the same as analogue recordings in the same way that digital pictures are accurate - but you can usually tell that they're digital if you look hard enough (play "spot the artefact"). It's OK for aural wallpaper at work tho' - and it means I don't overplay the plastic! I have to admit to being something of a computer simpleton here, Cert - I have heard it is possible to copy vinyl to CD, but have never known how this is done. I assume you'll need specialised software, and you say there is a "huge difference" in quality. There are many of my old vinyl albums I'd love to get on CD, but not all of them are commercially available these days (or if they are, they're exorbitantly priced). Coupla questions, then: 1 - What is the physical process of transferring Vinyl to CD? 2 - What is the best software to use? 3 (and probably most importantly) - how good is the resultant recording; I know this can be a subjective opinion, but I'd value your views - I do have a good hi-fi system, and can be very critical of recording quality.....?

1.Given that your record deck is connected to your amplifier in the normal way and doesnt have an optical -digital output:

You need to connect your amp to the inputs on your soundcard with rca cables (aka;phono to phono)although they dont need to be expensive, spending a few extra quid can make some difference.

2. I use Nero Burning Suite 6.0 (£30 if you shop around) which comes with Nero Wave Editor. Wave Editor has clear instructions on how to transfer from Vinyl to PC, "clean" the recording (removes the pops etc) and create a CD or MP3.

3.Quality "acceptable" - a very subjective term, but I have pretty decent amp and speakers and I dont dance for joy when I hear my own CD version of the original vinyl, nor do I want to sling the CD across the room in frustration. Great as a back up, but obviously not as good as the original.

Certif1ed wrote: Oh - and goose is right - simply transferring a file to CD is lossless - it has to be because the CRC check would tell your computer that the two files are not the same. Try this; Create an Excel spreadsheet and stuff it with data until the file size is about 40Mb. Now copy it. Copy it again. Does any data get lost? I rest my case!  So a directly copied CD doesn't lose anything - it's impossible, AFAIK - although I'm open to decent scientific persuasion. How can a data file lose data without corrupting the file? The only way the sound can be changed is to apply an algorithm to the data file, such as a codec - ie if you convert it from CDA to Wav and back again. A straight copy of the CDA can change nothing. I guess it depends on how the burning software operates - whether it unpacks and repacks the data before burning or not. I use Nero 6 and haven't noticed any difference between copies and originals.

A perfect CD (ie no scratches, other damage etc) will be read perfectly by a perfect optical drive.The problem is that CD's and CD Drives are not perfect mediums (media?) for storing/tranferring data and different drives have different ways of dealing with large errors.Some drives take a guess (interpolate) on what the values should be based on the previous and following values.  Other drives just set the bytes to 0.  Some drives do a good job of reporting these conditions, while some others don't report any errors.  It is all up to the person who programmed the firmware in the drive.  You can see how many drives can give lots of errors in the final wav file but not report any errors to the extraction application.So it is down to the quality of the drive.

Suppose you extract the audio track from the copy, and it's an exact binary match of the track you wrote from your hard drive, but the CDs don't sound quite the same. What then?

Most people don't notice any difference between originals and duplicates. Some people notice subtle differences, some people notice huge differences; on better CD players, the differences are harder to hear. Some say CD-R is better, some say worse. While it's true that "bits are bits", there "are" reasons why CD-Rs may sound different even when the data matches exactly.

An excellent paper on the subject is "The Numerically-Identical CD Mystery: A Study in Perception versus Measurement" by Ian Dennis, Julian Dunn, and Doug Carson, submitted to the Audio Engineering Society (Preprint 4339, 101st AES convention). It's available for download in PDF form at http://www.prismsound.com/downloads/cdinvest.pdf. The paper is primarily concerned with why pressed CDs created at different plants or with different methods sound different, but the observations are relevant to CD-R as well.

The conclusions in the paper suggest that low-frequency modulations in the disc affect the servo and motor electronics, causing distortion noticeable to a critical listener.