Consumer electronics

Corbett | May 27, 2005 1:56 AM

I've been trying for at least 6 months to eek out enough time to transfer, mix, edit, and master the stuff I've recorded for some bands at the Living Room. And I'm not even that anal about it. Levels sound about right? No annoying eq glares? Doesn't hurt my ears? Finished. Done. Next. So finally I've made some headway, and today was the big get-it-all-transferred-to-CDs-so-I-can-pick-out- the-best-tracks day to whittle down each performance to one CD. This takes a lot of listening time, so I usually end up doing it on trains, in parking lots, waiting for my wife to buy groceries, whenever, and have to pack a bunch of CDs with me to get through it all.

Simple solution. Just buy a huge stack of CDs, and burn them. Yeah right.

It turns out that my boombox won't play the same CDs that my club CD player will. And my car won't play whatever the boombox plays, and the home CD players don't read the ones that can play in my car. This was infuriating enough, until I tried to isolate what type of CDR to buy to actually work on all players. Ha. I've tried over 20 brands with different surfaces by different manfacturers, and the results are as varied as my moods. I had to even map out a matrix to work through the permutations:

Now I know why they call it consumer electronics. It doesn't work, consumes all your time and patience, and eventually you go out and buy new electronics.

TDK yes no no
Mitsubishi yes no yes
Ricoh yes yes no
Sony yes yes no
Cursor no yes yes
Foxen pro no yes no
R. Data yes no yes
Imation no yes no
Melody yes no no
Phillips no yes yes

So since this was obviously getting no where, I was convinced it was my software. Different software, same result. Aargh. So it must be a hardware thing....so 30 seconds before I was about to run out and buy all new gear, I remembered that there were about 12 different speeds to try.

Experimentation, coffee, lots of swear words later....

It turns out that CDs burned at speeds which includes a "6" in it (36x, 16x) do not work on Panasonic boomboxes for some bizarre reason, but sometimes will work on Sony boomboxes. And it also turns out that the club's CD player will only accept CDs burned at 12x, but only some of the time, for some types of CDs, so basically it's all completely random.

So, screw it, I decide to re-burn everything at the lowest possible speed to bypass all this compatibility BS, which on my machine is 4x, and screw trying to make it cross-platform. As long as it works on one damned CD player consistently. So, a bajillion hours later, the CDs are all finally burned, and I'm duping them on a dedicated duping machine so other people can also listen to the same stack and give their feedback. Then the duping machine starts rejecting CDs. C'mon this is impossible. I can draw zeros and ones faster than I've burned them. So I go back and spot check, and the entire stack is corrupt. [long complicated expletives deleted]. They're all screwed up. Total digital crackle. Won't play on any machine, even on the computer drive that burned them [.........].

It turns out that I can't burn CDs at such SLOW SPEEDS. So I've just wasted another day, and have to start all over again tomorrow.

Sigh.

Category: Music

Comments (4)

Comments

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miltownkid

May 28, 2005 7:44 PM

Sounds like you need to try one of those iPod things. They're pretty cool.

Note: Something freakis happened when I hit preview.

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corbett

May 29, 2005 2:30 PM

Ipod, what's that? :)

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irishstu

June 21, 2005 5:50 PM

Ha. It's one of those new tape recorder thingies, only the tape lasts for AGES. Dunno how it all fits in there.

That record speed thing is a pain in the arse. Been constantly frustrated with that sort of thing for years now, with DVDs too.

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Inger

July 1, 2005 1:24 PM

Next time: the Matrix Maker. If you can't figure it out, I'll translate the Swedish for you one day when Christian's gone...

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