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Topic: Absolute best program for burning audio CDs (Read 14814 times) previous topic - next topic
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Absolute best program for burning audio CDs

What is the best program for burning audio CDs?
Nero, Feurio, or some other program, and why?
Wanna buy a monkey?

Absolute best program for burning audio CDs

Reply #1 –
Depends on your liking  Feurio is a very good Audio buring prog. EAC is very usable for Audio burning if your CD-RW is supported.
Nero is a good allround burning prog.

pick your choice
--
Ge Someone
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.

Absolute best program for burning audio CDs

Reply #2 –
*EAC writer has sample offsets.


*CDRWIN
-Stable
-Most compatible for hardware

I would use it with EAC CUE sheets.

Absolute best program for burning audio CDs

Reply #3 –
Most probably and almost definitely: Feurio!
All other possibilities cost a lot of money... And NERO isn't very suitable for this purpose.

Absolute best program for burning audio CDs

Reply #4 –
yup...


did you check here:
www.burnatonce.com

as close you can get perfection...
without paying a dime...

Absolute best program for burning audio CDs

Reply #5 –
dunno about burnatonce but my burner is not supported by Feurio!. I guess i will stick to Nero. havent tried EAC for burning. Should I? Is it better for audioCds than Nero?

Absolute best program for burning audio CDs

Reply #6 –
Quote
dunno about burnatonce but my burner is not supported by Feurio!. I guess i will stick to Nero. havent tried EAC for burning. Should I? Is it better for audioCds than Nero?

I don't know, but from my experience is even Easy CD Creator better than Nero as for burning audio...

Absolute best program for burning audio CDs

Reply #7 –
Quote
I don't know, but from my experience is even Easy CD Creator better than Nero as for burning audio...

Well, I cant seem to appreciate Easy CD Creator and if you are saying that, to you, Nero is worse, than ... i guess i really bette find an alternative for asudioCds. Weird thing.. I always thought Nero does descent job with audioCDs.Some ppl claim that the burning software does not matter that much.

Absolute best program for burning audio CDs

Reply #8 –
Nero and Feurio utilize the same burning engine AFAIK so there shouldn't be any incompatibilities ... maybe you should try the regular driver updates for Feurio ...
The name was Plex The Ripper, not Jack The Ripper

Absolute best program for burning audio CDs

Reply #9 –
yup...


it should realy be no question :

w32.
either jamie`s BAO,
Gambit`s Burrrn or
Demosten`s frontend for cdrtools

all uses CDRDAO
proven to be the best engine
for audio.. period.....

as for other OSes.. theres a bunch of frontends..


Absolute best program for burning audio CDs

Reply #10 –
Quote
yup...


it should realy be no question :

w32.
either jamie`s BAO,
Gambit`s Burrrn or
Demosten`s frontend for cdrtools

all uses CDRDAO
proven to be the best engine
for audio.. period.....

as for other OSes.. theres a bunch of frontends..



As much as I love (and use) BAO, I do find it a little cumbersome. Anyway, I care about features and this prog has them a-plenty (can't live without long filename support for my MP3 CDs)

But when people type stuff like this:
Quote
I guess i will stick to Nero. havent tried EAC for burning. Should I? Is it better for audioCds than Nero?


Quote
I don't know, but from my experience is even Easy CD Creator better than Nero as for burning audio...


Here goes my attemp at explanation: When audio is concerned, USE WHAT YOU ARE CONFORTABLE WITH. There is really no diference, as far as quality goes. EAC offers no quality advantage over other software (as a burning app). Andre developed its burning engine for two reasons:
1.- It supports every kind of CUE sheet produced by EAC (some software have problems with some types of CUEs)
2.- It supports write offsets. Do a search on "offsets" and you will find explanations by Pio2001 on why offsets are not really that important.

What Feurio offers is a sh*tload of options and features for audio CD mastering. Too many for my taste. It depends on what you need.
Nero, no matter what Budgie says is got better features on audio CD mastering than EasyCD Creator.  As far as burning MP3s, I think the question has been answered: all of the current software will produce tracks of the same quality, no matter what decoder is involved.
Budgie, I know that you do now believe in ABX or anything like it, but here's a little experiment. Extract an audio track (using EAC, of course) and burn it in a CD (I would also recommend burning a decompressed .mpc, .ogg or .mp3
Burn it with EasyCD, with Nero, with BAO, with Feurio, with anything that you stumble upon.
Extract the burnt tracks (using EAC, of course). Do a "compare wavs" in EAC.
The only difference you will find will be something like this: "xxxxx samples repeated/missing" This refers to the offsets (again, the search function is your friend). As long as it doesn't say "different samples". you are OK. It a perfect digital copy, clear and simple. Anything else is just placebo.
I'm the one in the picture, sitting on a giant cabbage in Mexico, circa 1978.
Reseñas de Rock en Español: www.estadogeneral.com

Absolute best program for burning audio CDs

Reply #11 –
Absolute best? I don't think there is such.
Feurio lacks the filters that Nero has, only works with WAV and MP3, and its non-destructive track editor is very limited (but the fastest)...
but if you don't need those features, then I'd say it's the best, at least the best made and with the best burning engine.

I've just tried BAO and it has better burning engine than I would have thought... it seems very robust, but the information when burning is clearly not enough for me (just a buffer indicator that it's always on 100% and the progress measured in MB instead of minutes like a good audio program should do). Feurio is at least as robust, and you can detect problems very easily thanks to its 2 responsive buffer indicators, actual speed, and a perfect progress bar (Ahead isn't able to do this simple thing properly).
I agree with JeanLuc partially, but are you sure the burning engine is exactly the same? Burning engine in Nero 5 was copied from Feurio, I mean they used the same idea of RAM buffer, and used the same instructions to lock memory I guess, so it's very good, but I've always got a slightly higher CPU load and clearly higher hard disk load (depending on Nero version or day, there were much more small accesses).

The problem with BAO is that it took 10 minutes to decode 50minutes of MP3s to WAV in a K6-333... is it possible to decode MP3 on the fly? (at 10x in that computer) That speed is not acceptable for me.
With BAO you burn a disk and then forget about it. The CD-Manager in Feurio is great to follow track of all CDs you've burned (there is a log with speeds, buffer levels, and you can recover deleted projects).
Also Feurio is the only cheap program that allows seamless tracks from MP3s or WAVs with size that it's not multiple of a CD-DA track (588 samples). One of the few programs that detects defective MP3 frames, and that lets you set index marks easily.
With Feurio you can load cue sheets and hear and edit them easily before burning.
Nero doesn't allow to do anything in Nero while burning. Feurio is multitasking and you can rip, see titles, play compilations or burn another disc while burning.

Quote
I always thought Nero does descent job with audioCDs


It should, but how could you trust a program that during a lot of months had a critical bug like cutting the last sector of WAVs from version 5.5.0.0 up to 5.5.7.8?
The worse is that errors keep appearing in modules that worked perfectly before!
IMHO, basically, Nero is bloatware with a lot of awful bugs, designed with a compromise for data and audio with a quite silly interface (stupid the way to make images and stupid how there are undocumented options that don't work like "remove silence from the start/end of *.cda" and truly stupid that it makes you remember every time to select 0 seconds pauses and DAO).
It can't even burn pauses correctly... (it deletes your music!!!!)  How can that be serious or professional?

(Bashing Nero is my favourite sport    )


PS:
Quote
but my burner is not supported by Feurio!.

The generic drivers could work well, but of course it's not the same.
It would be similar to use EAC to burn: a generic driver, that perhaps could work.

Absolute best program for burning audio CDs

Reply #12 –
I'd say that the best program for burning audio CDs is cdrecord
(But you have to decode everything to WAV for burning.)

Supports padding, CUE sheet support (if the drive supports it, mine does) ,
multiple writing modes (RAW16, RAW96p/r, SAO), burnproof-like technologies,
overburning, manual index markers etc.

Very minimalistic and powerful software.

<edit>
Forgot to mention is Linux console-only tool.
</edit>
I've changed only because of myself.
Remember, when you quote me, you're quoting AstralStorm.
(read: this account is dead)

Absolute best program for burning audio CDs

Reply #13 –
I like nero.

I don't know about the other programs, but Nero just plain works for me. Nice interface, and if you don't want to use the wizard there are more complicated settings. It's worked flawlessly for copying and burning audio and data CDs for me, so I see no prob with it.

EAC is a great ripper, but it confuses the hell outta me with burning. I didn't really look into EAC that much, since I was short on time when I was using it, but when I was, I had no idea what to do with arranging the track order and stuff. I like more advanced things usually since the options are better(like --alt preset standard opposed to MusicMatch's default 128k CBR), but I just haven't had much time to look into stuff for CD burning as much as I have for other computer stuff, since I rarely do burn CDs.

Absolute best program for burning audio CDs

Reply #14 –
I'm using EAC to make my LAME3.90.2 aps -Y mp3 files. Sometimes I burn audio CDs with Easy CD Creator using these mp3 files, without WAV conversion. Am I doing something wrong?

Absolute best program for burning audio CDs

Reply #15 –
Quote
Flash,Apr 4 2003 - 05:02 PM] I'm using EAC to make my LAME3.90.2 aps -Y mp3 files. Sometimes I burn audio CDs with Easy CD Creator using these mp3 files, without WAV conversion. Am I doing something wrong?

Welcome to the forum. You will find great knowledge in here. Before anything I will post you to the FAQ, which you should read EXTENSIVELY before posting on this forum.
Everybody here is really very nice, but attemting to ask questions that have already been answered dozens of times will probable get you less that enthusiastic reponse.

Having said that, there is NO problem doing what you do. It's called "on-the-fly decompression" which is done by the burning app on the fly.
As long as the burnt CD sounds fine, there is no problem at all.

Enjoy this forum.
I'm the one in the picture, sitting on a giant cabbage in Mexico, circa 1978.
Reseñas de Rock en Español: www.estadogeneral.com

Absolute best program for burning audio CDs

Reply #16 –
Thank you for the replay!

I'm already enjoying HA for some months(and the FAQ, too), and learned a lot in MP3 forum (after some visits at r3mix.net  ). But one thing I had doubts was this "on the fly decompression" (now I know its exact name... ).


Sorry my poor(maybe something wrong) english and thanks again.

Absolute best program for burning audio CDs

Reply #17 –
Quote
The problem with BAO is that it took 10 minutes to decode 50minutes of MP3s to WAV in a K6-333... is it possible to decode MP3 on the fly? (at 10x in that computer) That speed is not acceptable for me.

As a benchmark, I find that on a ~166 Pentium I can't decode mp3 on the fly
if burning at more than 2x. 
Based on that ,  you could probably do 4 or 5x.

Consider that any program supporting decoding on the fly will have to squeeze
10 minutes (on your computer) of extra work for the decode  into the burn time
of 5 minutes (at 10x) without running the risk of underrun.  Sounds like trying to
squeeze 10 pounds in a 5 pound bag to me.

I've been trying a lot of burners in the last few days.. plus having used some on
other computers.

Some factors:

On some burn programs you can keep cue sheets,  track list, whatever, so
you can make another copy,  fix a goof, add tracks, whatever.  Others
seem to make you keep a project file which is essentially the image
(ie 300 to 700 mbytes per CD )

Although not an "audio CD" per the question, I like being able to do "directCD" style
data disks.  I don't know what package supports this besides EZCD and Nero.

Some packages:
BAO: checked the CDtext box, but didn't get cdtext..
 

EZCD Creator: I have it on the old 166 computer.  IT seems to work pretty well, but I
have heard the newer version got pretty bloated.  Mine is "4".  It can save projects in a
short description file.

Nero: has description files.  It is more similar to EZCD than to the others I've tried.  Has ~30 day
trial period.  INCD (the packet CDRW component) seems to get bent out of shape on winXP
and pops up warning messages if a second person logs without rebooting.

DBpoweramp CDwriter:  Well integrated with their player program/database, you can "highlight album"
and send it to the burn program.  You can easily select extra tracks from the same group or genre
to fill out any extra room.  You can send tracks to the burn converter from Explorer.  It will decode
pretty much anything (mp3, wav, flacc, ape, vorbis, mpc, midi, ...) 
On the downside: No CDtext or playlists (both are planned), and saving a project means saving
the full size disk image.  THere doesn't seem to be any way to control or eliminate track gaps.  On the cheaper side for the paid programs.

Feurio: Can take m3u  playlists of mp3 (and wave?) but not vorbis.  Does CDtext.  Can retain projects, but
track list seems to display file name and not location.

Absolute best program for burning audio CDs

Reply #18 –
Quote
On some burn programs you can keep cue sheets,  track list, whatever, so you can make another copy,  fix a goof, add tracks, whatever.

..

BAO: checked the CDtext box, but didn't get cdtext..

burnatonce 0.97 will support full importing of toc and cue files (inc. eac's non standard cue) so you will be able to edit a disc assembled at a previous date with burnatonce, eac etc...

Checking the cd-text box in burnatonce's main window only tells burnatonce your writer is able write cd-text with the generic-mmc driver - you still have to give it some cd-text to write, either by using the mp3 or vorbis tags, freedb, filename conversion or by typing them in manually. 

Jamie

Absolute best program for burning audio CDs

Reply #19 –
For Me Nero is the best for Burning mp3 and ogg files directly as audio cd

Absolute best program for burning audio CDs

Reply #20 –
Quote
Based on that , you could probably do 4 or 5x.


It depends on program...
I thought that BAO was very slow (I overstimated my K6), but Nero was even slower, and Feurio was 40% faster than BAO.

Nero decodes MP3 at 4x.
BAO decodes at 6,2x (I made a mistake before when I said 10x)
Feurio decodes at 8,5x.
This test was done to hard disk, and Nero had many problems to access the HDD in a logical way. Maybe the performance is better when burning, but it shows there are quite bad programmers at Ahead.

I tried to install Nero 5.5.9.17 in that computer and it told me that there are outdated files in my system and it's going to update them in order to continue!!!!!
What the hell does Nero care about my system???  It shouldn't touch anything...
I had to reboot twice and it didn't even told me what files were updated!!!   


I have simulated burning at 4x with a Teac 4x SCSI:
Feurio: 4~6% CPU load - very nice policy to access disk  (animated icon was disabled)
Nero: 10~12% CPU load - much more accesses to disk. (Buffer underrun the first time I tried!)
BAO: 50% CPU load - seems robust anyway.


Could somebody that uses Nero tell me what's that "Remove silence at the end of *.cda tracks" option? (it seems it doesn't do anything and it's not documented).
Why would anyone want to enable "cache the track on harddisk before burning"? that option is stupid in an audio program if it has a RAM buffer (and it's enabled by default!!    )


Quote
Sometimes I burn audio CDs with Easy CD Creator using these mp3 files, without WAV conversion. Am I doing something wrong?

No. The quality will be the same. The only issue is that your computer will be much more busy while burning, so there are much more chances that something could go wrong (buffer underruns, BurnProof kickin in...).

Quote
Feurio: Can take m3u playlists of mp3 (and wave?) but not vorbis. Does CDtext. Can retain projects, but track list seems to display file name and not location.

Feurio loads playlists and cuesheets based on WAV or MP3 (very much faster than Nero in the case of MP3).
It seems that Ogg Vorbis will be supported in Feurio 2.
Sometimes I miss the location of files in the old project-sheets. I guess it can be "deduced" in that mix of letters and numbers, but I haven't tried it.  The location appears if the files are external (not created by Feurio).

Absolute best program for burning audio CDs

Reply #21 –
is there any program except EAC that can handle the noncompliant cue sheet EAC produces correctly?
is use the noncompliant cue sheet generation but EAC seems the only program that can burn them...

nero can't... sometimes ago i read that nero produces less c1(or was it c2) erros thaneac does... so i'm looking for a good burn program that can hadle my noncompliant cue sheets.
or do you think eac is fine for burning at 4x ?

Absolute best program for burning audio CDs

Reply #22 –
Quote
[
I tried to install Nero 5.5.9.17 in that computer and it told me that there are outdated files in my system and it's going to update them in order to continue!!!!!
What the hell does Nero care about my system???  It shouldn't touch anything...
I had to reboot twice and it didn't even told me what files were updated!!!  

Nero suggests uninstalling any other burn programs before installin Nero due to
possible driver incompatabilities 

They have a note somewhere about how to make Nero coexist on the same system with
EZCD.

BAO will make you download a backlevel ASPI driver (4.6) because the current one
is too new.  You have to jump through some hoops because the Adaptec install program
doesn't want to install it on winXP.

Absolute best program for burning audio CDs

Reply #23 –
Incompatabilities created by bad programs... 
I wonder how Feurio burns perfectly without installing any system driver...
There was a time when I had Nero, EZCD 4 and WinOnCD (apart from other harmless programs like CDRWin or Feurio) with no problem (I just disabled their drivers with the help of System Diagnosis tool in Feurio and they worked the same without those drivers, prone to create problems).

Quote
is there any program except EAC that can handle the noncompliant cue sheet EAC produces correctly?

I don't how those cue sheets are, but could this help?:
http://www.dcsoft.com/cue_mastering_progs.htm
I guess that Feurio complies only with the standard, but there were threads around here talking about Burrrn supporting non compliant cue sheets:
http://www.apehaus.com/burrrn/
I'd like more info about Nero burning with more quality than generic drivers...

Absolute best program for burning audio CDs

Reply #24 –
Quote
BAO will make you download a backlevel ASPI driver (4.6) because the current one is too new.

burnatonce doesn't 'make' you download/install any particular version of ASPI.  You may use any aspi layer that will function correctly on your system - this includes Adaptec's 4.60 or 4.7x as well as the nero aspi layer.

The simple fact is that the 4.7x layer is a bugfest and does not install correctly on most systems - as a result burnatonce does not support this aspi layer (ie. do not bother posting support requests @ burnatonce.com), I do not see why I have to clean up adaptec's mess!

Jamie