For this reason, most CD writing apps will allow you to choose your write speed. The write process can seem to run just fine, only for the CD to start skipping halfway through playback. Faster writing can sometimes cause errors, especially on cheaper discs. So even if you’re maxing out your write speed, expect it to take a minute more than what you’d calculate.Įven so, faster is always better, right? Not always. Read and write time also doesn’t include the time it takes to process and finalize the project.
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If you’ve got 15 windows open, chances are that you won’t be getting the fastest possible speeds. System resources can also limit your write speed. So if you have a 52x disc and a 32x drive, it will max out at 32x. Keep in mind that your drive will also have a maximum write speed. So the higher the maximum write speed of your discs, the faster they’ll burn. 4x would write the same disc in 20 minutes, and 16x write speed could get the job done in five. Needless to say, this low speed wouldn’t be terribly practical. So for an 80-minute CD to write at 1x, it would take 80 minutes. CD writing speeds are measured in “x,” with 1x equivalent to normal playback speed. CD Write Speedīesides disc type and quality, the other main thing you’ll want to look at is the maximum write speed. Get yourself a Blu-Ray writer, and you’re ready to start making backups. At the high end, that’s more than 70 times the capacity of a CD-R or -RW disc. A Blu-Ray disc can hold between 25 and 50GB, depending on whether it’s single or dual-layer. If you want a disc for data backup, rather than for music, Blu-Ray is your best choice. A CD-R drive can only write to CD-R discs, while a CD-RW drive can write to both CD-Rs and CD-RWs. Another thing to remember is that just as there are different types of discs, there are different types of drive. Most modern CDs have a 700MB capacity, but you’ll still see some 650MB discs floating around. This is sufficient for between 74 and 80 minutes of audio. For this reason, all of our best music CD choices are of the CD-R variety.īoth CD-R and CD-RWs have capacities between 650 and 700MB. CD-Rs, on the other hand, are best for music, since they’ll work in a wide variety of players. As such, CD-RWs are best-suited for data backup, where you’ll be overwriting them regularly. That said, many CD and DVD players struggle with CD-RW discs. Once they’ve been “burned,” they can no longer be rewritten.ĬD-RW stands for “Compact Disc Rewritable.” They’re similar to CD-R discs, but they can be rewritten more than one time. As the original name implies, CD-R discs can be written a single time. CD-R is short for “Compact Disc Recordable,” and used to be called CD WO for “Compact Disc Write Once.” CD-R discs have been available since the 1980s, but only gained popularity in the mid-90s as costs went down. The two most common varieties are CD-R and CD-RW. When you’re shopping for CDs, you’ll see different varieties. Look instead for durability ratings and user reviews. In other words, you can’t tell how good a disc is just by looking at it. Keep in mind that some manufacturers will dye their discs to make the substrate look like a higher quality. Gold substrate, on the other hand, can remain readable for as long as 100 years. Silver substrate will oxidize over time, and will fail in about 10 years. Different materials will last for different amounts of time. The main thing to look at in terms of quality is the substrate. They’re simply designed to ensure the central substrate doesn’t get damaged. The outer plastic layers don’t actually store any data at all. When the laser in a CD player strikes the substrate, it reads the blocks in this substrate, and extracts the data. This data is stored in a reflective substrate inside the disc. Each block can either be on or off, corresponding to a one or a zero in the digital code.
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Instead of a textured groove, the CD stores data in a series of tiny blocks. But records are analog, and CDs are digital. In some ways, they’re similar to vinyl records, which record music in textured grooves. Let’s take a closer look, and see how they all stack up! Choosing the Correct CD’s for Musicīefore we go any further, it’s important to understand a thing or two about how CDs work. This is a high-end data CD, but they’re so well-designed that they also work well for music. These CDs are a bit pricier, but are specifically designed to be written with music. Next, we’ll look at the Maxell High-Sensitivity Recording Layer Recordable CD. These basic, affordable discs come in a stack of 100 for bulk use. We’ll start by reviewing the Verbatim CD-R.
That’s why we’ve decided to review the best blank CDs for burning music. But if you want to burn your own CDs, you’re going to need some blanks to get started with.