Use a plextor burner compatible with plextools software.

Can anyone point me to a Windows utility that will measure the error
rates of my CDR's?

Thanks,
--
Eric

Practice Your Mixing Skills
www.Raw-Tracks.com
www.Mad-Host.com

Chris Cavell wrote:
Use a plextor burner compatible with plextools software.


Any other suggestions? I don't have a Plextor burner, and will not be
buying one any time soon.

--
Eric

Practice Your Mixing Skills
www.Raw-Tracks.com
www.Mad-Host.com

Then you're pretty much s.o.l. unless you can find a buddy who has one.
All the other methods are far more expensive...

Now that I think about it some early Studer CD players (which cost the
earth at the time) had an error rate display. Unfortunately they were
also very picky about playing disks with high error rates and were
prone to giving up with things got too hot. Maybe someone else can
help with the model numbers but again even on ebay I suspect a Studer
CD player will cost a few bob.

spud wrote:
http://www.infinadyne.com/
I think this shows error rates but it's been a while since I used it.

That's the company that used to be ArrowKey and I think there focus is
on data CDs, not audio CDs.

Error checking at its lowest level has to be done at the drive itself
since the drive will try to correct errors before sending the data on
to the computer or player. The Plextor drives have firmware that allow
you to read errors with the program that they supply with their drives.


I've seen brand new Plextor CD-R drives selling for mighty reasonable
prices these days. I keep thinking I, being on the trailing edge of
technology and not yet having a DVD-R drive, should get one of the
Plextors myself.

In article , EricK wrote:
Can anyone point me to a Windows utility that will measure the error
rates of my CDR's?

Plextools.
--scott
--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

In article , EricK wrote:
Chris Cavell wrote:
Use a plextor burner compatible with plextools software.

Any other suggestions? I don't have a Plextor burner, and will not be
buying one any time soon.

Buy external hardware. Most of the alternatives, like the Meridian machine,
are at least two orders of magnitude more expensive than a Plextor.

The first generation Sony and Kodak drives from the eighties could do error
rate checking with Sonic, as I recall.
--scott

--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

wrote:
Exact Audio Copy logs errors on ripping and has all sorts of error
related information on the site including some drive specific stuff -
it's free and well worth having a look at www.exactaudiocopy.de.

It only logs one class of error, though. Most of the actual errors
will never show up on it, because the drive never reports them. Same
with all the other alternatives using standard drives.
--scott


--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

Try CD-DVD Speed:

http://cdspeed2000.com/

EricK wrote in :

Chris Cavell wrote:
Use a plextor burner compatible with plextools software.

Any other suggestions? I don't have a Plextor burner, and will not be
buying one any time soon.

There are two levels of errors in your CD's--recoverable and unrecoverable
errors. Any recoverable errors are not reported by the average drive
because the drive took care of them (it recovered). The Plextor drives
will report these errors.

Why do you want to know recoverable errors? Because by the time
unrecoverable errors appear, the recording is already questionable.

Unrecoverable errors on audio CD's will usually be hidden by interpolation
and other error correction routines, so you still won't usually hear them.

EricK wrote:

Can anyone point me to a Windows utility that will measure the error
rates of my CDR's?

There aren't supposed to be any errors. If there were, CDRs wouldn't be
a usable backup and storage method. Nero will 'verify' a burn for you.

Graham

On 9/11/05 2:17 PM, in article , "Pooh Bear"
wrote:


EricK wrote:

Can anyone point me to a Windows utility that will measure the error
rates of my CDR's?

There aren't supposed to be any errors. If there were, CDRs wouldn't be
a usable backup and storage method.

Wrong.. There ARE errors. The data encoding system is built SOPECIFICALLY to
assume there ARE errors and reconstruct the data IN SPITE of them... This is
the EXACT reason that audio CDs are MUCh more touchy than Cdrom data
formats.. Audio cd has VERY VERY MINIMAL redundancy while Cdrom data is
classic hugely robust encoding.

"Pooh Bear" wrote...
There aren't supposed to be any errors. If there were, CDRs
wouldn't be a usable backup and storage method. Nero will
'verify' a burn for you.

Suggest looking up the specifications for Red Book
(audio) vs Yellow Book (CD-ROM) & Orange Book
(field-burnable) Quite different handling of error detection/
correction. ALL optical discs have errors. (And so do all
other forms of data storage including magnetic media.)

Red Book has a relatively weaker correction mechanism
because interpolation is a viable work-around. Computer
data formats, OTOH, have more robust mechanisms to
ensure bit-perfect data recovery.

Pooh Bear wrote:
EricK wrote:

Can anyone point me to a Windows utility that will measure the error
rates of my CDR's?

There aren't supposed to be any errors. If there were, CDRs wouldn't be
a usable backup and storage method. Nero will 'verify' a burn for you.

There are ALWAYS errors. It's very unusual to find a disc without at
least a dozen correctable errors on the report, and that is for
a pressing.
--scott

--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

EricK wrote:

Can anyone point me to a Windows utility that will measure the error
rates of my CDR's?


I assume you're talking about recoverable errors.

Different drives have different levels of reporting and this only to those
programs that actually request the lower level info. I believe you're more
likely to get this error info from a burner than from a cdrom.

Besides Plextools, there are other programs that report or graph the C1 and
C2 errors. I last looked for programs several years ago and you should
search anew, but I have installed-

CD-R Diagnostic from Paul Crowley

CD Doctor 1.2.0 beta

Let us know what you find.

EricK wrote:
Can anyone point me to a Windows utility that will measure the error
rates of my CDR's?

Thanks,

Thanks for all of the input so far. I haven't been able to read all of
the posts so far. I guess I should have mentioned, what I am really
looking for is a way to check the CD after I burn it. The other day I
burned a CD, and when I took it somewhere to play it. It just wasn't
very reliable. It played in a couple of players, but there was one
player where the first song played OK, there were a few glitches. Then
songs 2-6 would not really play at all. I could get a few little burst
of music, but that was it. I assume I just burned a bad CD, but I would
like to know if there is a reliable way to check this before I get
caught with a bad CD in an important situation. The next day, I burned
the same program material, at a slower speed on the same media, and it
played back fine on the CD player that wouldn't play the first CD.

--
Eric

Practice Your Mixing Skills
www.Raw-Tracks.com
www.Mad-Host.com

EricK wrote:
It played in a couple of players, but there was one
player where the first song played OK, there were a few glitches.

Players vary in their tolerance for recordable CDs. Some combination of
good quality media, "+" media (which may be better tolerated by audio CD
players), a good drive, and slower recording speeds *MAY* overcome
this... or may not. I own a player that flat-out refuses CD-R and CD-RW
media but tolerates DVD+RW; I haven't tried all the other combinations yet.

This isn't just error rate; it's also analog signal levels. A recording
that's fine for one consumer CD player may not be good enough for
another, and I don't know if there are any affordable PC drives which
will report _that_ much detail to an analysis program...

Joe Kesselman wrote:

EricK wrote:
It played in a couple of players, but there was one
player where the first song played OK, there were a few glitches.

Players vary in their tolerance for recordable CDs. Some combination of
good quality media, "+" media (which may be better tolerated by audio CD
players), a good drive, and slower recording speeds *MAY* overcome
this... or may not. I own a player that flat-out refuses CD-R and CD-RW
media but tolerates DVD+RW; I haven't tried all the other combinations yet.

This isn't just error rate; it's also analog signal levels. A recording
that's fine for one consumer CD player may not be good enough for
another, and I don't know if there are any affordable PC drives which
will report _that_ much detail to an analysis program...

If you are fairly competent at electronics design, you can intercept the
'analogue' signal as it comes off the reading head of the player and
view it on an oscilloscope. That will tell you a lot about the quality
of the disc and how close it is to the point of failure.

As far as I know, there is no commercial equipment which you can buy to
do this - I made my own:
http://www.poppyrecords.co.uk/other/CDtestcircuit.gif

--
~ Adrian Tuddenham ~
(Remove the ".invalid"s and add ".co.uk" to reply)
www.poppyrecords.co.uk

EricK wrote:
what I am really
looking for is a way to check the CD after I burn it. The other day I
burned a CD, and when I took it somewhere to play it. It just wasn't
very reliable. It played in a couple of players, but there was one
player where the first song played OK, there were a few glitches. Then
songs 2-6 would not really play at all.

Players are like that, particularly older players. Some just don't like
CD-Rs very much and tend to be flaky. I suspect that there's nothing
you can test with a program like PlexTools that would predict that kind
of behavior. Do what the telephone compmay does - blame the problem on
the customer's equipment.

As you've discovered, finding the correct writing speed (you can get
more errors if you slow it down too much) is the best way to mitigate
this problem, and the best test instrument is a CD player that's fussy
about playing CDRs. I've found that by using blanks of predictable
quality (I use Taiyo Yuden) rather than Office Depot or computer store
generic blanks and burning at 2/3 of the drive's top speed almost never
produces a disk that won't play.

In other words, don't try to cover your ass by testing disks before you
send them out, cover your ass by coming up with a method that
consistently writes playable disks. And if it's a critical situation,
send the client two or three copies. Chances are one will play no
matter what he plays it in.

"EricK" wrote in message

EricK wrote:
Can anyone point me to a Windows utility that will
measure the error rates of my CDR's?

Thanks,

Thanks for all of the input so far. I haven't been able
to read all of the posts so far. I guess I should have
mentioned, what I am really looking for is a way to check
the CD after I burn it. The other day I burned a CD, and
when I took it somewhere to play it. It just wasn't very
reliable. It played in a couple of players, but there was
one player where the first song played OK, there were a
few glitches. Then songs 2-6 would not really play at
all. I could get a few little burst of music, but that
was it. I assume I just burned a bad CD, but I would like
to know if there is a reliable way to check this before I
get caught with a bad CD in an important situation. The
next day, I burned the same program material, at a slower
speed on the same media, and it played back fine on the
CD player that wouldn't play the first CD.

I just had a similar experience, except this time the
problematical CD would load and play on some players and not
others.

Thing is, the rest of the stack work perfectly all over the
place.

I really lucked out, as this was the top CD in the spindle.

I wrote the whole experience off as bad QC, and burn the
rest of the stack slow, just to be sure.