Burning a CD

I am going to try using 1x or 2x in the future and see if this solves the issue. The CD's started out sounding good and ended up sounding bad after as little as 6 months, but I was recording and burning at 8X. Also, my experience with the real cheepo CD's such as the $10 for 100 varieties were that they are totally un-useable. Thanks for all the helpfull suggestions.

I'm a fairly astute computer user but not a techie by any stretch of the imagination. I use a Hitachi DVD drive for the master and a Sony burner with the Spresa software that came with it. I don't copy directly but rather make a temporary image on my hard drive prior to burning. I do burn at the maximum speed. I use the cheapest media I can buy since I make so many CD's for photo distribution for my customers. My best guess is that I have made 300 CD's of various stuff, mainly photos, and have yet to have a failure.

I have a question regarding drop-out that is mentioned in another post. Some background first. I also rip my CD's into my computer for listening while I work. Winamp uses fewer system resources than playing the original CD through the DVD drive and since this is just background music, I'm not concerned with playback quality. The earliest form of copyright protection seems to be the addition of errors in the original CD which makes a computer confused during the ripping process. There are songs which I can't successfully rip into my computer based mp3 library. I can successfully copy and burn these discs however for use in my truck. If drop-out is real, wouldn't the computer get confused by the missing information (sorry about the non-tech language here) and fail to rip the song from a recorded CD? I just did an experiment with my burned CD's to see if they rip like the originals. They do, exactly. The experiment was done with 3 year old CD's that stay in my truck 24/7/365. The disc manufacturer is Prodisc Technology, Inc. for my media, is bought at Compusa for $15 per 100 and are so cheap that they don't even have a mat finish on the top side. These are finger print nightmares. I also label them with a Sharpie.

Can someone give me some insight into why so many people are having problems doing this? Perhaps put in a better way: do the people that are having problems with drop-out also experience a lot of failures during the burning process? I have yet to make a coaster.

I just started using Nero Burning Rom. It really seems to work very well. I had previously used Adaptec Easy CD Creator for years and years. I have a new, extremely fast, TDK CD burner. I have been burning my latest CDs at 20x. I haven't had any problems with them yet. It is amazing to be able to copy a CD in 3 minutes.