High Quality Blank CD's

[kballa422 10+ year member]

What brand of blank CD's do u all use to burn cd's? I have a bunch of albums on my itunes and I want to put them on CD, but I have had CD's before that sound horrible, the end of the CD is full of static. Any suggestions?

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[JoshHd6 10+ year member]

most likey it aint the cds ur using..its the quality of the tracks..anything less them 192 is trash...EAC/LAME>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

 

[nVRuckus 5,000+ posts]

If your sure your tracks are good then id get VERBATIM cd's... or ....Fuji.... thats it. Dont buy n e thing outside of that!

yup the verbatims are awesome. the deeper the blue of the burned side the better quality. but I think poster #2 is dead on. your probably using 128 or less bitrate on your mp3s and thats the problem.

 

[Paddywad 10+ year member]

I have always used Memorex CDs, haven't had an issue with them yet. Haven't used the Verbatim for music, but I have for DVDs, excellent quality. I have used some Fuji when at work, good quality as well.

 

[xluben 10+ year member]

i know for dvd's the manufacturer 'ritek' is by far the most reliable.

their cd's come branded many ways, though. makes it hard to tell if they actually made them.

if you did download from itunes, i believe all their songs are 128kbps AAC, which isn't too good.

but you mentioned the end of the cd sounding bad, that would be an issue with the disk not being consistent out to the edge.

 

[kballa422 10+ year member]

Right, the songs only become distorted if they are on the end of the CD. I could put Late Night Tip as track number 1 and its perfectly okay, but if its track 18, its very distorted. I dont have this problem all the time, but it has happened before, but I just never payed attention to what brand CD's it was. The songs arent downloaded from iTunes, the majority of them have been imported from original CD's, but those CD's were my friends, so I dont have the original, and Im wanting to put them onto blank CD's. I will give those verbatims a shot, thanks guys.

Can you all tell me if there is a way to bitrate of the tracks? I know I do have some songs that I have downloaded that aren't that good quality and i was wondering if there was a program that u can use to increase the quality.

 

[yacob.naif 10+ year member]

128kbps AAC, which isn't too good

Bitrate is a poor indication of what the decompressed file is going to sound like

mp3 is mpeg-1 layer 3

AAC generation 1 is mpeg-2 layer 7, and AAC generation 2 is mpeg-4, both of which are FAR better compression than mpeg-1

And the quality of the encoding process itself has a LOT to do with how good the finished file sounds.

Take, for example, mpeg-2 harware compression, which can be used to record a file from a video capture card directly to your hard drive, or a dvd (standalone dvd recorder) in real time.

It's GOOD quality, but when you compare it to a commercial grade professionally digitized dvd you'd buy at the store, there's no comparison. The encoding process alone used to create commercial dvd's takes WEEKS to complete.

The same difference in final quality can be attributed to using the 'fast' 'typical' and 'slow' encoding settings in LAMEmp3, WMP, or any encoding program.

The more passes you allow the encoder to take, the more data it can keep, and squeeze into your selected bitrate, while a faster encoding process doesn't go back and recheck to optimize your bandwidth, and often times throws away data that it didn't need to in favor of getting done faster.

So a 128kbps AAC file you make at home, and a 128kbps AAC file you download off of itunes, while both being LIGHTYEARS ahead of mpeg-1 layer 3, could potentially sound quite different from each other.

And to the original poster, 0db white noise is often added to copyrighted tracks that are shared illegally on p2p programs, by the anti-piracy teams creating identically sized/named/and tagged files as the songs they're attempting to protect, which are not the song itself, but nothing but white noise.

By putting these 'fake' files on a super fast T1 or T3 server, your p2p program often switches to their servers if your primary source drops in speed, or kicks you off, leaving gaps and parts of the song as the 0db static rather than the main song, so it's in the source itself, it's not a product of the recording process.

 

[xluben 10+ year member]

Right, the songs only become distorted if they are on the end of the CD. I could put Late Night Tip as track number 1 and its perfectly okay, but if its track 18, its very distorted. I dont have this problem all the time, but it has happened before, but I just never payed attention to what brand CD's it was. The songs arent downloaded from iTunes, the majority of them have been imported from original CD's, but those CD's were my friends, so I dont have the original, and Im wanting to put them onto blank CD's. I will give those verbatims a shot, thanks guys.
Can you all tell me if there is a way to bitrate of the tracks? I know I do have some songs that I have downloaded that aren't that good quality and i was wondering if there was a program that u can use to increase the quality.

yeah, sounds like it's definitely a problem with the medium (discs).

if you ripped them with itunes, then they're probably 128kbps AAC. if you're using itunes:

-right click on the song

-click "get info"

-summary tab

-third line down (below album art) should be bitrate

once you have encoded them at a lower quality there's no way to get the data back (except to rip from the original cd again).

when you encoded, you basically threw out a bunch of info //content.invisioncic.com/y282845/emoticons/frown.gif.a3531fa0534503350665a1e957861287.gif

but if it sounds fine as track 1 on the disc, then i don't think encoding is your problem.

 

[Suomi 10+ year member]

I use whatever is on sale at Best Buy. I have never had any issues with any brands. Even the cheapest ones—$5/25CDs—sound fine. Try some of the brands recommended, and if those have the same issues then your CD burner may be the problem.

 

[xluben 10+ year member]

back when i first started burning cd's (pre-2000) i had a bunch of memorex ones with a white label.

within a year the label flaked off, and took the data with it //content.invisioncic.com/y282845/emoticons/frown.gif.a3531fa0534503350665a1e957861287.gif

haven't burned many cd's lately, it's all on my ipod now.