I find most of the time bad CDRs is due to either a poor quality CDR, or the result of an insufficient data stream being sent to the CD Recorder (i.e. poor performing bus transfer rates to the CD Recorder which could be caused by anything from a slow computer, or a busy I/O bus (this can easily occur with IDE bus configurations since all the I/O on both the primary and secondary bus is asynchronous.) I used to burn about 100+ CDs monthly for my job, and we used 5 different CD Recording stations. After a substantial trial and error period (and several hundred trashed CDRs), we found by using a separate SCSI bus configuration (both the CD Recorder and Hard Drive are SCSI) we were able to bring the reliability rate to near 100%. With a synchronous bus like SCSI, it's much tougher to starve the CD Recorder of data since all the drives on the bus are reading and writing simultaneously. We basically NEVER trash CDs anymore, and found you can still use the computers while the disks are burning since our data disk is separate from the system disk and our SCSI Controllers are all Bus Mastering (they all have 2 SCSI buses.) SCSI costs a lot more, but I feel it out weights the cost given how easy it is to waste time and money on blanks. The best drives we've had the most success with are Teac and Plextor. We've also used drives from Pinnacle, Mitsumi, and Sony, but we've been the most happy with the other two. I have no experience with the new TDK (IDE Velo CDR) or new Plextor (12x10x32 - SCSI based, it came our right after we bought the 12x4x32 unit), but they both list that a new "burn proof" technology you might want to try out if you continue to constantly trash discs. As for the recording software, I feel the best software package out there is Disc-At-Once from Goldenhawk Software in Merrimack, NH - www.goldenhawk.com. We use the 32-bit DOS version as it's way more powerful than the Windows version (you can build custom queue files (a.k.a. Table of Contents) such as multiple data tracks, mixed mode, etc. and perform sector reads on a scratched or slightly damaged media for data recovery), but the Windows version is just as reliable and it's much easier to use if you aren't that experienced. We've tried most of the others including Gear, CD-Creator, EZ-CD, Nero, and one other that I can't remember right now, but none of them worked as reliablely as DAO. Good luck!
