You have just 'backed up' your favorite CD to a CD-R. You go to play it and - it's full of noise. Snaps, pops and crackles all over the place. Must be bad software or a faulty blank, right?
Wrong. There's a chance that it comes from a dirty or noisy CD; if that's the case, clean it or change it. But the most probable cause is your hardware and its Digital Audio Extraction or DAE. There's a page on the subject of DAE here. This page is devoted to how to tell whether that's your problem and what to do if it is.
The telltale symptoms of faulty DAE are that the noise is in an extracted WAV file and that the amount of noise varies over the disc (usually worse as the track number goes up). There are three ways around the problem: read at alower speed; change the reader; or transfer through analogue. Note that a drive may extract digital audio at higher than rated speed, at rating, only at 1x or even at less than 1x, the speed at which it plays CDDA. And if your preferred reader does not do acceptable DAE (or doesn't do it at all), you should try your writer as a source.
Control of reader speed depends on the extraction software. Some programs, such as Plextor Manager, give you substantial control and let you select from 1x to the drive's maximum. Most do not and automatically select the highest possible speed. On many drives, that speed is too high for the sound to be free of noise. (Why is it that Plextor - all of whose readers except the 6x do DAE at maximum speed essentially without error - is the company that helps you use the lower speed you don't need on their drives. Unfortunately, the drives that need such a Manager can't be used with Plextor's and their manufacturers offer no equivalent.)
Replacing the reader is costly, but it is the best solution. No, you do not need to use a Plextor. There are many other good drives out there and you may be able to find one that costs less and is good enough for you. However, I have seen many posts that said: I finally gave up and bought a Plextor; I should have done it months ago. And in case you wondered: I get no kickback from any of the manufacturers I name. They've never offered, so I haven't even been tempted.
Finally, you can try recording a WAV with your sound card instead of DAE. Just make sure that you use the CD Player as the input by selecting it in the mixer and setting an appropriate level. (Alternative: run a cable from the player's headphone out to the sound card's line in.) If you have no appropriate s/w, you can try the Windows applet, but it will only record to memory so you may not get much music unless you have a lot of RAM on your system. Any of the WAV editors (links to several are on the URLs page) will do better for you. There are several reasons why you may be unhappy doing it this way. The most serious is that your are using digital-to-analogue conversion (DAC) in your reader and ADC (guess!) on your sound card. Each of those is imperfect and the artifacts that they create compound one another. A less important difficulty is that the sampling rate you get depends on your PC's clock, so the playing speed may be slightly higher or slightly lower than the original. However, because of the interaction of similar frequencies in non-linear processes (boy, he knows big words), resampling can produce artifacts such as subtle beats or recurrent noise. Still, it costs nothing to try this approach and if it works, don't fix it.
E-mail me at cdrecording@mrichter.com
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