Drive Stopped Burning Audio Discs

Question

My Disc drive (G5 3 years old) seems to have stopped burning Audio discs using Toast. It seems to be doing data discs ok, but it appears domestic and computer players will now no longer accept my audio discs (Even both my Macs). Its always worked fine in the past and nothing has really changed to my system. Is this the sign of an ageing drive and do I therefore need a replacement? Is there anything I can do? I have tried burning different speed settings.
Thanks folks

Answer 1

If the G5 is also having trouble reading the discs it sounds as if the drive is producing really bad burns. Having either the cd or dvd side of things stop working properly is a classic sign of a drive on its way out. The drive begins to produce burns with much higher error rates, and more serious kinds of errors, than usual. All drives produce errors with each burn, but it's the kind of error and intensity of the error that matters. Drives have built in error correction circuitry that can handle the most common error type as long as they are below a certain level. Older drives often begin to either produce much higher error rates that the reading drive can't compensate for, or produce a non-correctible type of error. To make matters worse, the number of errors depends not only on the drive, but the relationship between the drive and disc being used. Each drive has firmware written to tell the drive how to write to different brands of media. Apple rarely updates the firmware on their drives, so after a few years the drive has to guess the writing strategy for each disc and this too can lead to high error rates. And to confuse things even further, companies that sell discs rarely make them, but buy them from oem manufacturers. So one batch of say TKDs may be Optidisc and another CMC and you have no way of knowing by just looking at the disc- you are thinking you are using the same discs but aren't.
So one or more of these factors is giving you burns so bad that the drive the disc was burned on is having trouble reading it, and that's a very bad sign. I would suggest from my experience with many drives that a drive behaving as yours is - one that is 3 years old - should be replaced. A new drive will only run you about $40, it will have new firmware allowing it to work with current discs, and should be faster also.
If you have access to a pc there are actually a number of programs that will allow you to test the discs and see what type and how many errors the burn has produced (I find this one of the few redeeming values of PC's). These programs are invaluable in situations like yours, and as I said, from my experience, the programs usually indicate with your symptoms very high error levels or errors that cannot be corrected.