i have always been curious about this. the prices of cd burning programs are quite diverse - from free to over $1000. aside from a few cosmetic features, do all programs burn effectively the same way and produce the same result?

The result will be the same quality-wise, besides minor issues like gaps between tracks, possible problems with standalone devices (skips) caused by differences in buffering -> burnproof/justlink kicking in (can be avoided by lower burning speed).

I would say the difference between the applications are the amount of features and support!

Solaris

gday..

all-in-one.. data/dvd or pure audio..?

and for your question:


nope.. there much difference between burning engines..
for different task`s.. you have the major comerse ones:
ahead.. nti.. VOB.. padus.. hmm. forget roxio..
small ones: engelman.(padus ripoff) etc.
and free alternatives: cdrdao.. cdrecord/dvdrecord etc. (forget cdrwin.. since
it is basicly a cdrdao code.
(i place EAC and feurio in there own legue.. am not sure what engine there using.)

most of them seem to have a spesial approach.
some of these engines are way better than the others..
it`s realy a matter of what you fancy.. and how serious you are..


did this make sense..?

n68: pure audio. i realize there are cosmetic differences but with regards to the core function, cd burning, i wanted to know if they all produce the same results, and if so, then why are some so expensive.

ok, so what is so special about other burning routines? besides a few bulky features, what makes them so special?

solaris and tigre: i think you're probably right. it seems that some developers charge above and beyond for bloated products.

The more expensive programs are aimed at professional recording studios where the CD's must be to exact Red Book specifications and a lot of work is goinginto authoring the CD with original material.

If you just want to "rip mix and burn" many of the general purpose cd mastering programs like Nero will do it for you.

For just burning audio CD's from various compressed formats (.MP3, .OGG, .FLAC .MPC) or making MP3 CD's for a CD based portable MP3 player, even the freeware Burnatonce will get the job done.

Get your hands on Burnatonce and EAC for a start and see what they can do before you spend any money. I don't know what came with your computer or drive, but even that program might turn out to be able to do the job. A lot of people like RecordNow Max which comes free with many drives.

one can create red book cds using virtually any cd burning program without having to spend over $500 on it. well, maybe some of the more cheaper programs do lack something after all. but as far as what's been said here quality wise it should be the same.

This is what I look for,

-Stable burning engine
-Support for CUE sheets, writing gaps
-Support for offset correction
-Available decoding plug-ins

& for writing data (mpc CD's etc.) I would want UDF file system & long file name support.

@Outscape

I said Exact.

For example, burnatonce will burn audio with a 4 second pregap before the first track in its default setup. It can be fixed, but CD Architect checks for stuff like that.

Yes, if you burn the same WAV files with different programs, you'll get the same disc, except for details like offsets, filling the last sector with zeroes in certain WAVs, etc.
(mmm, well, this is what tigre already said )

The quality of the burned disc depends on hardware and media.
At least, that's how it should be, AFAIK, but then you find that, for reasons that I ignore (and I'd like to know), sometimes certain programs produce discs with inferior quality.

QQuxa has that problem in this thread:
http://club.cdfreaks.com/showthread.php?threadid=88980
and I've read more cases like that...

i see. yes, you're right, if you enable the "strict compliance with red book" from options.

minix: you just created more controversy
that's actually the first i heard of quality issues with nero.

Burning Errors:

This depends on the combination of the drive, media and burning program. I have used a variety of programs (including Nero 5.5 and 6.3), two different drives and mostly CMC Magnetics Media to burn Audio. I recently used CDSpeed to check for C2 errors. There were none.

If you have any doubts at all, test with CDSpeed rather than speculate.

In a few last days I checked all my burned audio CDs and to my great surprise there were only rare C2 errors. More than a half of my disks come from period between 1997 and 1999, they are mostly gold Kodaks. The rare cases when C2 errors occured, were Imation, BASF and Platinum disks (always on last tracks and only in cases when CD was full - up to the brim), Kodak, TY, TDK, Maxell and BTC (!!!) were error free... The burning software was up to 2003 Feurio! and the burner Yamaha 4416S external SCSI.