Thank you for bringing us back to this nostalgia! I think to this day, CDs still Rule! (Except those frustrating buffer underruns.) Even though the drives back then were slow, but once a disc was successfully recorded, you can have a long lasting piece of media. I still have 17 year old CD-Rs that still sound great to this day! I also remember the days of "Adaptec" before "Roxio" took over. Despite the new flash memory media nowadays, the CD-Rs and CD-RWs are still chugging along side of them.
I miss all the designs and stuff of burnable CDs. CDs with different coloured plastic, CDs that looked like LPs all that cool shit. Now you can only find boring labels or just blank printable ones.
Love all your videos man, I look forward to them just as much as I do videos from Jay Leno. I remember burning CDs off an old Windows ME machine in high school and listening to them on the bus on one of those old awful Sony portable CD players
Actually, "music" CD-Rs *are* different than regular data CD-Rs. Music CD-Rs have a special encoding allowing them to be used in standalone audio CD recorders. The record companies knew that the ability to copy CDs would threaten music sales, so they forced manufacturers to restrict audio CD recorders to only being able to burn on "music" CD-Rs, and a small portion of the price of each music CD-R sold would go to the record companies, as essentially a "copyright tax". So if you try to put a regular data CD-R into an audio CD recorder, it won't work. But unfortunately for the record companies, CD burners in computers don't have this restriction, so most people didn't bother to buy an audio CD recorder or special music CD-Rs; they just copied audio CDs on their computer, using regular data CD-Rs.
I fully agree, that's all the truth. I have a standalone CD recorder and it does indeed require the special "music" CD-Rs. You can still buy them, I just did about a year ago.
Music CD-R's did confuse a lot of computer users. A lot of people got the wrong idea that you couldn't burn music onto a Data CD-R and you had to buy Music CD-R's for that instead.
I dont think the CD-R manufacturers cared if people were buying the wrong ones. I never saw any info on Music CD-R wrappers saying they were just for those stand-alone recorders.
Kids don't know they are born with their flash drives and buffer protected drives for their music. Spending a hour with your fingers crossed every time you went to burn a CD, pure trepidation!
I went through the same thing in the early 00's. I burned a lot of coasters because of buffer underuns and CD-R quality was so inconsistent even with the well known brands. My favorites then were Verbatim Datalife Plus with the Azo blue ink backside. The mix CD-Rs I made with them back then still play fine back fine now. BTW I would just replace that old HP burner with a IDE Lite-On burner. I bought one cheap around 2002 that came with a free copy of Nero and it burned better than any of the Sony and Yamaha drives I had.
All my fails were media. As you say even name brands like Sony would have crap. I also think it was Verbatim that had the best disks. Not sure now but I would get them at Walmart, CDW, and maybe another online place Im not remembering.
I got my Verbatim CD-R's at Sam's Club then. They sold them in 10 packs with jewel boxes. Later they sold them in 25 or 50 CD-R spindles. Sam's still sells Verbatim discs now but they are the cheaper "life series" and not the metal AZO.
Reminds me of my first PC in 1998. Base unit £299 which had a Cyrix 233 Processor and 32MB of Ram. Also added on a Philips CD Writer for £229. Daft paying that much looking back, but it just seemed so cool at the time and futuristic. CDRs were 90p a pop too
I remember back in the day of using that software and running into TONS of buffer underrun errors....I would get a 10 pack of CD-Rs and get maybe 3 "full length" albums because I could get about 4 tracks on one disc and 3 or 4 on a 2nd disc and the remaining tracks on a 3rd disc. Of course, It took me a few times to learn to burn discs in "Track-at-once" because once the track was done, it would play that track....so if it failed burning the 4th or 5th track, the first few would actually play....but with "Disc-at-Once" mode, it wouldn't do that...(at least in my experience)...with "Disc-at-once" it had to be successful at writing the whole CD or songs would skip or not play or the disc wouldn't be read at all if it didn't burn successfully...
I hated losing so many discs in the first few seconds after starting the burn process. Once I had a decent brand of writer, a Plextor 8432Ti I never lost a disc after that, although I still had problems playing the discs in my various HiFi CD players. Many players especially the portable ones were EXTREMELY picky about the brand of blank discs used. Buying more expensive quality blanks did not always work either, because some of the cheapest and crappiest blanks often worked best! Just like the RUclipsr BBISHOPPCM's World says in this video, it really was a black art getting things to work!
I never had any luck with that software. Half the time it would throw an error halfway through the burn, can't remember what it complained about though. I've found imgburn to be much more reliable even if some of it's modes are oddly hidden away around it's interface it does a very good job.
"Good ol' CD rot"? But how, how did you get the rot? I'm really trying to figure this out. In 20 years I have had only 1 disc do anything like rot and that was some strange unbranded thing I somehow came across. There must be some common property that affects discs in the USA that causes this rot to happen. Is it climate, Aircon, crap manufacturers? Is it that I'm just lucky in that my discs were all EU and Japanese/Taiwanese made or is my climate better?
Now this is something I will never miss. You know something is wrong when you get better success rate of copying copy protected games on floppy disks, than any CD. I don't miss that time at all.
I remember in college 2000 to 2002, I had the best time with my computer I had for a while. I would burn CDs like there was no tomorrow. The burner I bought had NERO burning ROM for those that remember that. It wasn't fast, 2x but I used it for burning copies of music CDs, PlayStation 1 games, and CDI rips of Sega Dreamcast games and some Saturn games. I used to burn MAME CDs for my friends and family that had computers so they could have fun too. At the time USB flash drives were very small 16 to maybe 500 mega bytes, so CDs were still the way to go. Nowadays, most new computers don't come with any optical drives, and flash drives hold quite a bit more than CDs and DVDs and are a lot cheaper so I use those. 🙂
The first time I ever burned a recordable CDR was on an old Pentium 100MHz PC with a 2x drive. I still have those discs that I burned from that session in 1996, and they work perfectly. They cost around £10 GBP PER DISC! So you can imagine how nervous, anxious and on edge I was until they had burned successfully, although thinking about it I think I bought three Maxell gold discs, and one ended up as a coaster but was still playable albeit incomplete.
Lots of early CD players did have problems with CD-R discs, but I'd say most CD players made before 2000 or 2001 wouldn't play CD-RW media at all, not due to bad media, but for other reasons that I don't really understand properly.
The original CD standard defined specs for how reflective the "pits" and "lands" had to be. The difference between the reflectivity was lower with CD-R discs, so players and drives that were designed to only just barely meet the specs wouldn't be able to read the later disc types.
Oh gosh, I remember those early 2000s when you burnt an audio cd and it wouldn't play on anything except a pc :( It made making mix cd's that extra bit harder.
I got this same CD burner, and I tried using it to burn an audio CD using the HP CD Writing software in a Gateway 2000 with a Pentium Pro 200 mhz. It was very intuitive, but I had to do some work to get the software to accept my audio files. I let the software automatically determine the best speed to use to burn the disc, and it settled on 1x. When I clicked burn, it came up with a dialog box saying do not do anything else while burning this CD, for exactly the same reason you stated. The burn was successful. Maybe 4x was too fast for your computer to handle? That would be my guess as to why it didn’t work.
It's so sad that almost all developers dropped support for macOS Snow Leopard & Lion. I mean the 2007 iMac runs just fine on Snow Leopard with the newest (supported) version of Firefox & Chrome.
Come to think of it I need to burn about 3 more cds of music from my collection. The 6 disk changer in the Mustang decided not to change the other week and I had to get them all out. Dont want my nice original CDs in it now...like my Ozzy and Metallica and even Enya :)..im so 80s and 90s ...those were my favorite days. used to love Teac stuff. Had a cd player and a 3.5" drive. Still have that one...somewhere.
Other than a couple music cds about 5 years ago I haven't burned anything since the mid 2000s. And I didn't burn anything until the late 90s. before that it was all floppy disk. I think all in all I had 4 or maybe 5 coasters. And it hurt back in the old days when cds and dvds were expensive. I remember 3.5" floppies costing like $20 or more for 25 or so of them.
An up to date Operating System and more modern hardware would have burned that CD considerably more easily. I never use old IDE CD ROM drives in any of my hardware no more. I use at least CD-RW but ideally DVD-RW or BD-R.
The second computer I had was a third hand IBM ValuePoint With a 100 MHz 486-DX4 and both PCI and ISA slots (1993-1995 time period). It ran Windows 98. At the time, I knew it was possible to write to floppy disks in which I did. I was curious If this machine could be used to write blank CDs. I was told no because CDs are a write once technology that only the software manufacturers had the ability to write. Later on, however, in 4th or 5th grade (2001-2003), there was a computer at school with a CD burner. I have long since got rid of this computer. Could have this machine written CDs given it had a CD burner?
Fortunately, I have a 1.5Ghz G4 PowerBook that can still burn CDs or DVDs as requested.;) A Lenovo ThinkPad SL410 will also do such pedestrian duties under Windows 7 Professional. The disk burn software is/was made by Roxio. (Toast for Mac, CD/DVD Creator for PC.) The external burner is a LaCie d2. Speaking of DVDs, do you remember the "+R/-R" compatibility problem between DVD players?
I always used WMP to burn CD and MAN was that a headache. Half the time it "could not burn to CD" for some unknown reason and it would always take it's time preparing the track then fail unexpectedly. Of course, this was when I wanted to burn 16 songs at a time and it would take almost an hour so I would leave it and come back later. I came back to a CD with only 6-8 tracks on it.
Yamaha CD-RW drives, yeah baby. I lost track of how many discs I burned, and the drive still works! 4x speed drive, EIDE, Memorex sucks! Dell actually told me that Memorex discs can damage the drives that Dell uses in their laptops, and my laptop is a Core i5, about 3 years old. I don't use Memorex anymore
I managed to miss burning optical media. I was too young and mother too not tek savvy to use the Cd drive in the win95 Compaq for more than games and pre packaged software. Internet was too slow and too poor for dvd burner let alone blank dvds to make sense. And when costs were low enough, usb sticks were a better dvd r/w for my needs.
I remember in the mid 1990s when a 2x Creative Lab kit with drive and crap was about $250. I used to one a Plextor because they were supposedly the best...and had a tray caddy! :) Lucky I was never silly enough to get that. Later I fell in love with nothing but Lite-On drives. Best drive ever owned. I own a LG these days. Had it many years but I got it because it has the cd printing stuff called LightScribe built in. Not as handy as I though.
I hope you don't find this creepy or anything, because I honestly don't care but... In the end scene where you put the pop on the night stand you have a piece of mail with your address on it. Don't know if you want that out there or care, just thought i'd let you know just in case!
In all the years I have burnt CD's, DVD's and Blu-ray I have only had a handful of coasters. Of course I don't get any these days. But I'm totally shocked at the quality of your discs!? You really had discs that were missing the laquer?! And what the hell is wrong with that pressed CD? Where was it made? Is it a Nimbus CD made by Nimbus in the UK in the early 90's? Those had failed like that disc due to a bad laquer formulation. Till today I have never seen such damage. I keep hearing it: "my CD's have all rotted away", mostly on Reddit and in RUclips comments. I can only assume it must be something to do with me being in Europe. Something about the US climate or the heavy use of Aircon must kill optical discs. Or perhaps because I'm in Europe most on my discs are/were EU and Japanese ones. I have heard of the horror of MAM-A discs made in the USA. It must be something like that.
You must be using some very poor quality discs. I haven't had anywhere near this many problems even on older computers. Disc rot was confined to one pressing plant in the U.K., Not a wide spread issue to all discs. I have a 2000 iMac with a super multi drive I have never burned a coaster with and it's been running for years.
![[TAS] NES Lunar Pool by eien86 in 22:53.62](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/WSPpKtAprB8/mqdefault.jpg)
Thank you for bringing us back to this nostalgia! I think to this day, CDs still Rule! (Except those frustrating buffer underruns.) Even though the drives back then were slow, but once a disc was successfully recorded, you can have a long lasting piece of media. I still have 17 year old CD-Rs that still sound great to this day! I also remember the days of "Adaptec" before "Roxio" took over. Despite the new flash memory media nowadays, the CD-Rs and CD-RWs are still chugging along side of them.
I miss all the designs and stuff of burnable CDs.
CDs with different coloured plastic, CDs that looked like LPs all that cool shit. Now you can only find boring labels or just blank printable ones.
ahhh the memories from the 00"S .. I always called my failed ones frisbees though.
Love all your videos man, I look forward to them just as much as I do videos from Jay Leno. I remember burning CDs off an old Windows ME machine in high school and listening to them on the bus on one of those old awful Sony portable CD players
Actually, "music" CD-Rs *are* different than regular data CD-Rs. Music CD-Rs have a special encoding allowing them to be used in standalone audio CD recorders. The record companies knew that the ability to copy CDs would threaten music sales, so they forced manufacturers to restrict audio CD recorders to only being able to burn on "music" CD-Rs, and a small portion of the price of each music CD-R sold would go to the record companies, as essentially a "copyright tax". So if you try to put a regular data CD-R into an audio CD recorder, it won't work. But unfortunately for the record companies, CD burners in computers don't have this restriction, so most people didn't bother to buy an audio CD recorder or special music CD-Rs; they just copied audio CDs on their computer, using regular data CD-Rs.
I fully agree, that's all the truth. I have a standalone CD recorder and it does indeed require the special "music" CD-Rs. You can still buy them, I just did about a year ago.
Music CD-R's did confuse a lot of computer users. A lot of people got the wrong idea that you couldn't burn music onto a Data CD-R and you had to buy Music CD-R's for that instead.
***** That's also very true.
Thanks! Come to think of it, I do remember hearing about this YEARS ago, but totally forgot!
I dont think the CD-R manufacturers cared if people were buying the wrong ones. I never saw any info on Music CD-R wrappers saying they were just for those stand-alone recorders.
I remember that program, burning from mp3s is relatively easy, the real experience come from making a mix cd from multiple physical cd's.
Kids don't know they are born with their flash drives and buffer protected drives for their music.
Spending a hour with your fingers crossed every time you went to burn a CD, pure trepidation!
I went through the same thing in the early 00's. I burned a lot of coasters because of buffer underuns and CD-R quality was so inconsistent even with the well known brands. My favorites then were Verbatim Datalife Plus with the Azo blue ink backside. The mix CD-Rs I made with them back then still play fine back fine now. BTW I would just replace that old HP burner with a IDE Lite-On burner. I bought one cheap around 2002 that came with a free copy of Nero and it burned better than any of the Sony and Yamaha drives I had.
All my fails were media. As you say even name brands like Sony would have crap. I also think it was Verbatim that had the best disks. Not sure now but I would get them at Walmart, CDW, and maybe another online place Im not remembering.
I got my Verbatim CD-R's at Sam's Club then. They sold them in 10 packs with jewel boxes. Later they sold them in 25 or 50 CD-R spindles. Sam's still sells Verbatim discs now but they are the cheaper "life series" and not the metal AZO.
I still make CDs to this day and my dad still have CDs that he made in 2000s and they still work to this day
Reminds me of my first PC in 1998. Base unit £299 which had a Cyrix 233 Processor and 32MB of Ram. Also added on a Philips CD Writer for £229. Daft paying that much looking back, but it just seemed so cool at the time and futuristic. CDRs were 90p a pop too
I remember back in the day of using that software and running into TONS of buffer underrun errors....I would get a 10 pack of CD-Rs and get maybe 3 "full length" albums because I could get about 4 tracks on one disc and 3 or 4 on a 2nd disc and the remaining tracks on a 3rd disc. Of course, It took me a few times to learn to burn discs in "Track-at-once" because once the track was done, it would play that track....so if it failed burning the 4th or 5th track, the first few would actually play....but with "Disc-at-Once" mode, it wouldn't do that...(at least in my experience)...with "Disc-at-once" it had to be successful at writing the whole CD or songs would skip or not play or the disc wouldn't be read at all if it didn't burn successfully...
yep
The first thing, that I bought, was a CD-RW. :D
I remember the horror of burning a cd then seeing the screensaver pop up and go OMG NOOO and then the cd would fail XD
I hated losing so many discs in the first few seconds after starting the burn process. Once I had a decent brand of writer, a Plextor 8432Ti I never lost a disc after that, although I still had problems playing the discs in my various HiFi CD players.
Many players especially the portable ones were EXTREMELY picky about the brand of blank discs used. Buying more expensive quality blanks did not always work either, because some of the cheapest and crappiest blanks often worked best! Just like the RUclipsr BBISHOPPCM's World says in this video, it really was a black art getting things to work!
CDBurnerXP forever!
I never had any luck with that software. Half the time it would throw an error halfway through the burn, can't remember what it complained about though. I've found imgburn to be much more reliable even if some of it's modes are oddly hidden away around it's interface it does a very good job.
The best I used to use...AFAIR....was Nero. Before that went crapware mad.
I used Nero as well until they ruined it from maybe v6 onwards. Since then I have used ImgBurn.
I still make CDs and cassette tapes to this day
Good ol CD rot, half my old dreamcast games don't work anymore, luckily it's a super easy system to make new cds for
"Good ol' CD rot"? But how, how did you get the rot? I'm really trying to figure this out. In 20 years I have had only 1 disc do anything like rot and that was some strange unbranded thing I somehow came across. There must be some common property that affects discs in the USA that causes this rot to happen. Is it climate, Aircon, crap manufacturers? Is it that I'm just lucky in that my discs were all EU and Japanese/Taiwanese made or is my climate better?
Now this is something I will never miss. You know something is wrong when you get better success rate of copying copy protected games on floppy disks, than any CD.
I don't miss that time at all.
I remember in college 2000 to 2002, I had the best time with my computer I had for a while. I would burn CDs like there was no tomorrow. The burner I bought had NERO burning ROM for those that remember that.
It wasn't fast, 2x but I used it for burning copies of music CDs, PlayStation 1 games, and CDI rips of Sega Dreamcast games and some Saturn games.
I used to burn MAME CDs for my friends and family that had computers so they could have fun too.
At the time USB flash drives were very small 16 to maybe 500 mega bytes, so CDs were still the way to go.
Nowadays, most new computers don't come with any optical drives, and flash drives hold quite a bit more than CDs and DVDs and are a lot cheaper so I use those. 🙂
The first time I ever burned a recordable CDR was on an old Pentium 100MHz PC with a 2x drive. I still have those discs that I burned from that session in 1996, and they work perfectly. They cost around £10 GBP PER DISC! So you can imagine how nervous, anxious and on edge I was until they had burned successfully, although thinking about it I think I bought three Maxell gold discs, and one ended up as a coaster but was still playable albeit incomplete.
Some earlier CD players didn't want to play CD-Rs or only those with a silver coating.
It's been a long time, I can't remember exactly.
Lots of early CD players did have problems with CD-R discs, but I'd say most CD players made before 2000 or 2001 wouldn't play CD-RW media at all, not due to bad media, but for other reasons that I don't really understand properly.
The original CD standard defined specs for how reflective the "pits" and "lands" had to be. The difference between the reflectivity was lower with CD-R discs, so players and drives that were designed to only just barely meet the specs wouldn't be able to read the later disc types.
Fry's today has an entire wall of blank disks
Did you finalize the session? I remember forgetting to do that several times before.
Oh gosh, I remember those early 2000s when you burnt an audio cd and it wouldn't play on anything except a pc :( It made making mix cd's that extra bit harder.
man thank you for introducing me to steely dan
I got this same CD burner, and I tried using it to burn an audio CD using the HP CD Writing software in a Gateway 2000 with a Pentium Pro 200 mhz. It was very intuitive, but I had to do some work to get the software to accept my audio files. I let the software automatically determine the best speed to use to burn the disc, and it settled on 1x. When I clicked burn, it came up with a dialog box saying do not do anything else while burning this CD, for exactly the same reason you stated. The burn was successful. Maybe 4x was too fast for your computer to handle? That would be my guess as to why it didn’t work.
"Old, slow, and reliable" kind of like the Ford 7.3 PowerStroke engine :-P
It's so sad that almost all developers dropped support for macOS Snow Leopard & Lion. I mean the 2007 iMac runs just fine on Snow Leopard with the newest (supported) version of Firefox & Chrome.
wow, i've never had any of my disks, burned or retail, do that. I have plenty I burned from 97 onward that still work just fine.
Same here. I have a copy of Rollercoaster Tycoon that my aunt made me when that came out and it looks perfect.
If you can, look into M-Disks. Apparently they're very good for long-term archival.
Come to think of it I need to burn about 3 more cds of music from my collection. The 6 disk changer in the Mustang decided not to change the other week and I had to get them all out. Dont want my nice original CDs in it now...like my Ozzy and Metallica and even Enya :)..im so 80s and 90s ...those were my favorite days.
used to love Teac stuff. Had a cd player and a 3.5" drive. Still have that one...somewhere.
Loving that background, one of the coolest from Win98. Anyone got a high res version ?
Other than a couple music cds about 5 years ago I haven't burned anything since the mid 2000s. And I didn't burn anything until the late 90s. before that it was all floppy disk. I think all in all I had 4 or maybe 5 coasters. And it hurt back in the old days when cds and dvds were expensive. I remember 3.5" floppies costing like $20 or more for 25 or so of them.
Steely Dan forever!
cool one
An up to date Operating System and more modern hardware would have burned that CD considerably more easily. I never use old IDE CD ROM drives in any of my hardware no more. I use at least CD-RW but ideally DVD-RW or BD-R.
I have a lite on ide DVD-RW/CD-RW and it hasn't made a bad disk
The second computer I had was a third hand IBM ValuePoint With a 100 MHz 486-DX4 and both PCI and ISA slots (1993-1995 time period). It ran Windows 98. At the time, I knew it was possible to write to floppy disks in which I did. I was curious If this machine could be used to write blank CDs. I was told no because CDs are a write once technology that only the software manufacturers had the ability to write. Later on, however, in 4th or 5th grade (2001-2003), there was a computer at school with a CD burner. I have long since got rid of this computer. Could have this machine written CDs given it had a CD burner?
I agree that Apple hasn't had a very good optical drive in a while, every MacBook I have had has an issue with the optical drive.
Fortunately, I have a 1.5Ghz G4 PowerBook that can still burn CDs or DVDs as requested.;)
A Lenovo ThinkPad SL410 will also do such pedestrian duties under Windows 7 Professional.
The disk burn software is/was made by Roxio. (Toast for Mac, CD/DVD Creator for PC.) The external burner is a LaCie d2.
Speaking of DVDs, do you remember the "+R/-R" compatibility problem between DVD players?
I always used WMP to burn CD and MAN was that a headache. Half the time it "could not burn to CD" for some unknown reason and it would always take it's time preparing the track then fail unexpectedly. Of course, this was when I wanted to burn 16 songs at a time and it would take almost an hour so I would leave it and come back later. I came back to a CD with only 6-8 tracks on it.
Yamaha CD-RW drives, yeah baby. I lost track of how many discs I burned, and the drive still works! 4x speed drive, EIDE, Memorex sucks! Dell actually told me that Memorex discs can damage the drives that Dell uses in their laptops, and my laptop is a Core i5, about 3 years old. I don't use Memorex anymore
I managed to miss burning optical media. I was too young and mother too not tek savvy to use the Cd drive in the win95 Compaq for more than games and pre packaged software. Internet was too slow and too poor for dvd burner let alone blank dvds to make sense. And when costs were low enough, usb sticks were a better dvd r/w for my needs.
ive burned CDs with an old external Lacie SCSI CD burner on an Mac Performa 475.
I remember in the mid 1990s when a 2x Creative Lab kit with drive and crap was about $250. I used to one a Plextor because they were supposedly the best...and had a tray caddy! :) Lucky I was never silly enough to get that. Later I fell in love with nothing but Lite-On drives. Best drive ever owned. I own a LG these days. Had it many years but I got it because it has the cd printing stuff called LightScribe built in. Not as handy as I though.
Burn a mixtape for your cold ones.
gotta use a program like k3b that just works
My early 2009 iMac has a working cd drive
So does my 2007!
BBISHOPPCM's World I can see that in the video that's why I'm like some still work
I hope you don't find this creepy or anything, because I honestly don't care but... In the end scene where you put the pop on the night stand you have a piece of mail with your address on it. Don't know if you want that out there or care, just thought i'd let you know just in case!
thanks! Ironically, it's the wrong address!
oh haha, well that works out then doesn't it
In all the years I have burnt CD's, DVD's and Blu-ray I have only had a handful of coasters. Of course I don't get any these days. But I'm totally shocked at the quality of your discs!? You really had discs that were missing the laquer?!
And what the hell is wrong with that pressed CD? Where was it made? Is it a Nimbus CD made by Nimbus in the UK in the early 90's? Those had failed like that disc due to a bad laquer formulation. Till today I have never seen such damage.
I keep hearing it: "my CD's have all rotted away", mostly on Reddit and in RUclips comments. I can only assume it must be something to do with me being in Europe. Something about the US climate or the heavy use of Aircon must kill optical discs. Or perhaps because I'm in Europe most on my discs are/were EU and Japanese ones. I have heard of the horror of MAM-A discs made in the USA.
It must be something like that.
Gaucho!
Some jvc micro stereo set i have wont even play some factory music cds.
It is truely bad
infrarecorder - free and tiny - get it from ninite
You must be using some very poor quality discs. I haven't had anywhere near this many problems even on older computers. Disc rot was confined to one pressing plant in the U.K., Not a wide spread issue to all discs. I have a 2000 iMac with a super multi drive I have never burned a coaster with and it's been running for years.