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Your CD burner is all too willing to make a recording that nobody's computer can decipher.
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Al Fasoldt's reviews and commentaries, continuously available online since 1983
T e c h n o f i l e
Be careful! You can inadvertently burn unreadable CDs
June 25, 2006
By Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2006, Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2006, The Post-Standard
You'd think a recording device invented 16 years ago would be bug-free by now. But we have a long way to go before we can trust CD burners to make fool-proof disks.
The problem? Believe it or not, your computer's CD burner is all too willing to make a recording that nobody else's computer can decipher -- and that not even YOUR computer can figure out.
That's because the computer geniuses who designed recordable CDs must have all gone to lunch when the time came to devise what should have been a simple procedure -- ending a recording.
I'll explain this in simple terms:
When your computer burns a CD on a recordable CD (on a CD-R, in other words), the recording isn't over when the recording is over. Even when the recording stops, when nothing more is being burned onto the disk, when the laser inside the CD burner stops doing its thing, the recording isn't over.
It's only over when the disk is finalized. That's what geeks and out-to-lunch CD-burner engineers call it. "Finalizing" the recording writes a marker that says, in effect, "This baby's all done!" It also creates a kind of index to what's on the disk. When a disk is finalized, any computer with any kind of modern CD drive should be able to deal with it easily.
But what happens when a disk is not finalized is the devil's own playground.
First, the recording just plain isn't finished. There's nothing on the disk that says the recording is done. And, thanks to the goofy way CD-Rs work, if a recording isn't done, it doesn't really exist.
Second, the recording can't even be located. It doesn't exist, remember? (Don't ask me. I didn't create this crazy scheme.)
Now you'd normally expect this problem to be rare. Burning CDs is easy, right?
Not if you click the wrong button on your screen or if you take the CD out of the computer's drive before it's been finalized.
Is there a secret to making a foolproof CD? Yes, and it's easy to remember:
Never burn a "session." Always burn a "disk."
I've put those terms in quotes to show you that they mean something other than what you might think they mean. A "session" is a recording that takes up only part of the space on the disk. You can add other sessions later.
Burning a "disk" means making a recording that is a one-time deal. Once the recording is done, the disk can never be recorded on again.
As you can guess, "session" recordings usually are the problem. If the disk isn't finalized later, or if a "session" isn't created just right, the CD might be unreadable. "Disk" recordings typically can't cause such a problem because the CD burner finalizes the disk as part of the recording process.
Remember: Don't create a "session." Always create a "disk."
Next week: A report on special software that tries to rescue unreadable CDs, on both Windows and Mac OS X.
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