It's been about a month or so since I finally got my P4 rig (see sig) up and running, and everything was running smoothly up until so far. The problem is, both of my Lite-On burners refuse to burn audio CDs correctly. They burn data CD's just fine, but if I try to play audio CD's in my CD player, in my car, or even on this very computer, it plays track one, some of track two, but simply does not play after that! I can cycle through the tracks, but it doesn't play anything. I've tried different media, burning with both drives, and I believe that I got it to work once when I burnt it on my DVD+/-RW at 16x. Keep in mind the max speed on the DVD burner is 40x. This is very strange, and frustrating as well. I have a Lite-On 52x32x52 burner on my AMD machine and it works like a charm. Why are both of these acting up?

- I've tried burning using Nero 6 and WinOnCD 5, but both yield the same results.

- I'm running Windows XP Home with SP1 and all critical updates, and everything has been virus scanned, spy-ware scanned, defragged, and checked.

- I tried disabling my virus scanner and Zone Alarm, but the same thing happens.

- I have updated the firmware for both drives, but the same thing still happens.

- I have tried Memorex 52x and Sony 48x CD-Rs, both of which work flawlessly on the Lite-On in my AMD machine.

- I've made sure that both IDE channels have DMA enabled.

- I've loaded the latest aspi drivers.

UPDATE: It turns out that I can get the audio CDs to play only if I burn them at 16x or slower on either burner. Data CDs are fine at 52x...

Could anyone help me out here? I'd really appreciate it.

BUMP: Anyone?

Audio is only ever played at 1X, therefore it should be burnt at the slowest possible speed.

The reading speed has nothing to do with the writing speed you should use. Slowest possible burning speed will quite likely produce worse results than the highest speed or some intermediate speed.

That said, for some reason some audio CD players don't seem to like CDs burned at high speed, even though the error rate as shown on the CD drive is very low. I suspect it's something about the shape of the marks on the disc that they can't cope with like a CD-RW drive can. For example, I have a Sony Discman that won't play anything burned over about 20X properly..

I am also having this problem with my Liteon LDW-401s ES0K FW. It burns the audio to the disc but doesnt play in a cd-player/HiFi?? So i have to use my LG dvd/cd-rw combo for music

try burning it at 8x speed MAX....the home/car cd-players read at 1x,unlikely with the PC CD-tray...so if you write audio with higher speed it could prevent home/car cd-players from reading it correctly...

no problems here with HSOK and liteon 811s
I burn all my audio cds at 24x and never a failure.
Using Nero 6.3.1

Sorry, but whith a 40sec buffer and 1x speed, you have a problem !! Of course Car Cd Player reads at more than 1x, even home player plays at more than 1x.

Modern CDR discs are engineered for high speed writing, and thus writing them at lower speed is definitely not a good idea.

HitMan-sC, if you have some spare time, you could test with other brand and with other firmwares

* hint * you can even try to upgrade your 401S to a 411S and try different firmware. BTW I always burn at Max speed and never noticed this kind of problem.

Friendly,
Fred.

The "always write at 1x" is rather outdated. The newer writers and media supposedly produce less errors when written at a faster speed. I agree that the fastest speeds ussually are asking for trouble, my audio is written at 40x with great results. 24x to 40x is probably the "sweet spot" for most of the current hardware and media.