buffer underrun

b4tn

b4tn

Registered
Just wondering? I have a g4 500 AGP. I have always even in OS 9 and again in OS X had problems with bufferunderrun errors when burning an audio cd unless I only use one drive. I will put the cd in the apple drive and the blank in my Que firewire 8x half way through it makes a coaster. Am I the only one who gets this? Also call me old fashioned but burning in the back ground seems really strange to me so I always close all programs and leave my computer for burning.
 
hmm, don't know what to say. i have the same que!fire and it has worked fine for me. with only an imac!! are you using toast (if so which version) or disc burner?

i use toast titanium. i still haven't tried the copy function since the new full function version came out. but it works in 9 and burns in the background just fine. internet and all. only reason to shut others down is if you are low on ram.
 
I have seen this problem on Macs and PCs, etc/etc....

The issue has to deal with Toast's Disc Copy feature. Apparently burning at full speed on my 8600 with an external 8x Yamaha SCSI burner will have the same problem. I am lucky to get a good disc burning at 2-4x. However, I can burn at 8x using a disc image just fine, and it is faster than burning at 2-4x (about 3 minutes to image, 4-8 to burn vs 16-32 to burn).

Don't know what to say...
 
Yep, QPS (the company behind the Que! line of low-quality products) used to sell a 'Que! Firewire Card' which stated that it was Mac-compatible. To my Mac with the required Firewire support, it looked like a 'PCI Slot'. Suffice it to say I got my 40$ back just to find out supplies were being recalled for some unknown reason. The company doesn't even have anything on the product online. Complete bull.

After my own experience with QPS, you can bet good money on the fact I won't ever be buying another QPS product in my lifetime.
 
`My 12x10x32 QPS burner (the graphite one) has been rock solid. It's made a total of 10 coasters in the 10 months that I had it. I haven't ever updated the firmware, and I've had zero problems with Toast for OSX.

On the other hand- I've heard horror stories from people with Sony drives... not to mention that the included software is worthless.
 
Make the transfer memory higher...and the problem will be solved (Memory..i mean not the one that the prog Toast uses.... but the one inside the toast preferences)
 
bb- that memory thing doesn't always work. it might , but it did me no good on my previous arhcos minicrdrw. still worth a shot though.
 
My que drive is also very stable It actually is the best I have had out of the five I have had (pc included) I burn Cd's with no problem as long as it is not an audio cd going from cd drive to cd drive. And actually in OS9 once toast five came out it worked fine. I alway set the memory to its highest setting and have not noticed anydifference. Someone had once mentioned to me it was possibly the gaps in a audio CD that cause this problem.
 
the gaps shouldn't make any difference. about 2 months ago i direct copied several audio cd's. no problems. i think the suggestion to slow down your burn might be the best one. i often do this as background burning takes the need to rush out of the equation unless someone is standing over the top of you wanting their disk back.
 
True, there are some good QPS products, but my experience has told *me* to stay away from them. Buying a product that is obviously defective (at least mine was), and then trying to troubleshoot what QPS reports as being non-existant is mind-numbing.

On a side note: I have only made coasters with Yamaha SCSI 8x8x24x burner when trying to do a drive to drive copy, and when stupidly trying to export a QT movie on a PowerSurge Mac while burning. Haven't updated the firmware either, but it has been solid for about a year. It was originally internal, but we made it an external and still have had no problems with it. Overall a nice drive...

(I would check out that RAM buffer size.... older machines sometimes need a bigger buffer when you are background burning, so that it doesn't run out of data while the CPU is clogged with the foreground app under OS 9)
 
I have not had ONE single buffer underrun in the last three years, once I found out about upping the memory in Toast's prefs, almost all of those have been data and not audio.

And in case no one has seen it, check out Toast's Dock icon (5.1).

progress.jpg


Yes, that's a progress bar. Cool. :D
 
Unless you have a drive with buffer under-run protection, don't burn in the background and devote your computer to just the burn process. I would not have an internet app running at the time either. Allocating more memory in OS9 will help but not eliminate the problem.
To be the most compatible with all audio players, burn as slow as you can stand! This causes the laser to burn the pits in the CD deeper which makes it easier for the reader to 'read data'.
 
You will almost allways get buffer underruns when going from cd to cd. This is because one component or the other will not perform at 100% and the other component cannot conpensate.

I recomend allways copying the cd to a hard disk first.

Using that method, I have *never* made a coaster.


btw, this site looks funny in NetPositive on Be... ;-)
 
i am using the exact same drive and i have never had a buffer underrun while going from cd to cd or while running apps in background, including using the web. uh, i've never had a buffer underrun or made a coaster with this drive!!! (knock on plastic)
so b4tn, how about sharing your mac specs so we can see what the differences are? maybe you just need more ram in general. or maybe you need to optimize your system disc or repair it. your g4 500 should be doing this a lot better than my imac 400.
one other possiblity, you might need to upgrade the bridge in your que drive. you would probably need to ask qps tech support to help with this. if the tech support tries to blow you off, ask for a supervisor and complain very adamently. i just had to update a hd bridge that is made by initio (who also might be able to help) who most likely makes the bridge in the que as well. at least my que has an initio bridge.
 
Cool... I didnt know Apple System profiler generated reports! Anyway these are my system specs. As for toast I have the ram cache always set to 64, I have had it at 2 but didnt notice a difference. I ussually just burn an image or do a disk copy on one drive. I just think that with this multi thousand dollar machine disk to disk should be possible. What is the bridge you had mentioned Ed? Is it something I could download? I went to Q's site and didnt find any firmware updates for the mac.

System: Mac OS X 10.1.2 (5P48)
Startup device
Name: BigGigX

Memory overview

Built-in memory: 640 MB
Number of empty RAM slots: 0 ()
Video memory: 32 MB
Backside L2 cache: 1 MB

Hardware overview
Model name: Power Mac G4 (AGP graphics)
Processor info: PowerPC G4 (2.9)
Machine speed: 500 MHz
Production information
ROM revision:
Boot ROM version: 4.28f1
 
Since Toast 5 came out, I have yet to burn only in the foreground...that's the whole purpose of Toast 5 (for me). I have not made ONE single coaster in almost 3 years (using a CD or a legitimate disk image) using 6 different machines and 4 different burners. By legitimate disk image, I mean, there have been times I've "forced" a bad burn, using a bad image or getting errors before hand....knowing it would probably fail. Blanks are cheap.
 
maybe somebody else can spot something, there is nothing about your specs that leads me to believe you shouldn't have less problems than me, not more.

i don't know exactly what a bridge is i must admit, i just know that last week i had to get a firmware update for one for the new 40gb hd i bought. while doing this and identifying my devices, the tech support guy (who was a supervisor, 1st guy tried to blow me and my problem off since he didn't know the answer) told me that the que bridge was the same as the one in my hd we were working on, so if it was working, we should be able to get the drive working too by updating. and we did!! but it is a little bit complex and you need tech support to talk you thru it. or at least i did. i still have all the stuff to do it with and would email it to you if i thought we wouldn't be taking a chance on screwing things up more. i will be talking to this tech rep next week about a different issue that he said he would help with. i will ask about this if you can't get qps to help. obviously this stuff is not just sitting out there on their website.

i can only think of 2 other things to suggest. slow your burn speed, maybe all the way down to 1x if nececsary, but i would think 4x would help. while your recording drive might work best at it's max speed, the read drive might not be able to keep up. and try waiting to insert each disc only when toast needs it. ie.- launch toast, click copy, insert read disk, hit record, insert record disc when prompted. roxio advocated this method with the osx beta and it might still be good advice with the final release.
i have also heard people suggest you only use discs that are max rated at the max speed of your recorder but i have never found this to be a problem. however if you are trying to record on 4x max media at 8x, it probably won't work very well. toast should keep you from doing this though by only allowing you to choose 4x in that case.
 
I was having buffer underrun errors everytime I attempted to burn a disk. I found that if I created a Toast disk image of what I wanted to burn and then burned that instead, i got much higher data rates and haven't had an underrun error. Also, try running the speed test a few times to check data rates adn to get your hard drive stabilized and focused on reading the disk image. Don't do anything else while you're burning, I found that even browsing the finder caused data rates to drop quite a bit. Defragging is a good idea if you haven't done it in a while (like me).

Hope this helped.
 
b4tn... I agree with most of the tips everyone has suggested. I would 'second' kilowatts recommendation of copying the cd to disk first. also verify the buffer setting and perhaps bump it up a bit.

I would also suggest that you try "optimizing" your disk (the one with the audio source) before you burn. The idea is that you want a contiguous single file to burn from. This is a well known issue with burners in the pro audio world. If the audio you are burning from is "all over" the disk. Your burner waits while your drive searches for the next file fragment. If it waits too long and the buffer runs out, you will have a coaster.

For more information on Audio cd burning check out DigiDesigns web site. Cllck on "Support" then click on "User Conference"

Read the forum dealing with " MasterList CD". Masterlist CD is their cd burning software for Redbook standard cd's. (Red Book is the original spec for CD audio. Orange Book is the spec for recordable CD's (CD-R).)

Hope this helps...

John
 
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