Overburning is when the disc rotates in your burner so slowly that the laser beam burns holes right through it. If you hold the overburned disc up to the light, you will be able to see a series of little holes that let drafts of air in, and make your .mp3s sound real awful. Sometimes, you can smell the plastic burning, and see little wisps of smoke coming out of my head ...... (er) I mean, coming out of the burner. A good way to tell if your disc is overburned, is to sprinkle a few drops of water on to the label side. In addition to help cooling down the disc, if the water leaks through to the other side, then yes, there are holes in my head .... (er)... I mean, there are holes in the disc, and it *has* been overburned. The only real good way to ensure that you don't overburn discs in the future, is to hook up an external power supply to your burner with twice the voltage that it is now receiving. That way, the disc will spin around twice as fast, thus reducing your chances of getting holes in it, and your mp3s will sound much better too. If you should encounter any more problems in this same area, please be sure to send $1.00 to my email address, and I will set you on the right road, as I am mostly a genius or something, in these matters. Hope this helps. Thank You. -- Professor Klingy --
LOL! Neromania, if you do use Nero, then undoubtedly you might have also noticed that it is usually shipped along with burners and that you can install the MANUALS in PDF that come with it. Also, under the preferences in Nero, it actually tells you right there what Overburning is.
Forgive me, neromania, I just had to get that out of my system. <gg> <Truly>, overburning means trying to get just a *wee* bit more data recorded on your disc than is usual. For example, an '80-min' disc will hold 80 minutes of (normal) audio, or 700 megabytes of data. With overburning, you might be able to get, perhaps 81 or 82 mins of music (or, say, 710 megs of data) on the disc, depending on how far you overburn it. This could come in very handy if, perhaps, you have a video file which is just a *tad* too big to fit on a normal 700 meg disc. But be careful - an overburned disc may or may *not* play back as you intend it to. Also, both your burner *and* burning software must support overburning. Although I've never tried to overburn a disc myself, I've read where a burner could conceiveably become damaged if you try to overburn a disc on a machine that was not designed to do so. Always check the user's manual. An alternative idea might be to seek out the hard-to-find "90 minute" blank cdrs. (I've never seen one though). (Sorry for the earlier tongue-in-cheek stuff; I'm just feeling 'nutty' today.) Good Luck. -- Mike --
http://store.yahoo.com/blankcdcdr/cdr-media-90---99-minutes.html Only some cd-r drives support overburning to 90 minutes, and even less support up to or close to 99 minutes. They have a list of compatible drives on that site, but just because your drive is not on it doesn't mean it can't write up to 90 and/or 99 minutes. My drive does not show up on that list but it CAN record up to 98 minutes, give or take a few seconds. I've done it. One thing to note is, only SOME drives can READ 90 minute and 99 minute CD-R's. But also, some drives that can READ 90 or 99 minute cd-r's aren't able to write them. And you most certainly won't be able to play 90 or 99 minute audio-cd's in an audio cd players on the market that I know of. Basically, 90 and 99 minute CD-R's are only for backing up purposes since they are so incompatable with the rest of the world, unless you know for certain a friends cd-rom drive can read them. And note, the newness of a cd-r drive has no baring on whether it can read or write up to 90 and/or 99 minutes. So just stick with 80 minute (700MB) CD-R's unless you really need that extra space for backing up files. Samsung SM-332B CDRW/DVD http://www.samsungelectronics.com/odd/combo/sm_332b.html
