cd burning speed

Check out a few online reviews for data CD-Rs; I assume that the quality of data CDs a particular writer will produce is closely correlated with the quality of audio CDs (this assumption may be wrong). Some actually perform _better_ at higher write speeds than they do at lower speeds. But, in general, lower write speeds are better. For many CD burners, you can find their performance with different media at different speeds. For example, check out some of the reviews at cdfreaks.com.

Auda ibn Jad

There have been several posts about this topic in the past; and it might be worthwhile to look them up. I own a commercial media duplication company and we've not only copied thousands of CDs and CD-ROMs, but even more DVDs. Generally speaking, slower burn speeds equal cleaner results. I duplicate most of my personal discs at 2X speed on a dual well Marantz professional CD recorder, and have never had a disc that didn't sound great. As for media types, we have used a lot of Maxell, Mitsui, and Sony CD-Rs with good results. Though we mostly use commercial grade discs; we've consumer stuff in a pich with good results.
As discussed above, don't waste your money on "cheapie" CD-Rs. Many are rejects from major disc makers that didn't pass quality control at the factory. Good luck!

Don't know about music, but I had to burn .NET at 2x speed. When I burned on 6x i had .ini file blank. Even after filling it out manually I had encountered further data inconsistancy during an application testing.
I think that music isn't less complicated than MSVS.NET and there may be certainly data losses depending on speed.

After a while I've burned quite a number of CDs from different formats and noticed that in my current workstation the speeds bellow 8x would stop burning due to the disk error. When I pull this CD out of tray I realize that it's not even half-full...

Marakanetz - I had bad copies using 8x DVD burner on 16x DVDs. Apple explains that problem might be related to limited range of power adjustment of the laser. Imagine writing 52x CDR with 2x speed. Burner adjusts laser power on a special track (assigned for that) but it might have hard time when moving slow (2x) while CDR is 52x (very sensitive photo-layer). Going much faster might be better but it requires faster computer operation and cause dropouts (buffer under-run). 16x seems like good speed - at least that's what my burning programs use in auto-mode.

I use Taiyo Yuden CDRs (they invented CDR) and burned over 500 of them without single coaster. Photo-layer is guaranteed to last 100 years.