CD and DVD Burning Guide

Nero StartSmart: an example of CD abd DVD burning software

To avoid burning unusable, unplayable, incompatible or defective discs observe the following:

1.  Use high quality media.  Defects in the media like scratches, scuffs, stains, contamination, defects in the plastic, will cause defects in your written disc. 
2. Keep your hands off the disc... or at least the underside of the disc. Fingerprints or dirt on the bottom of the disc can cause distortion of the writing or reading laser.
3. Keep your discs dust-free. 
4. Never wipe discs in a circle. 
5. Plan your burn - figure out what kind of disc you want to make.  If you want to make the disc playable in an audio CD player, you can’t format it as a ROM (data) disc.  If you want a DVD to play in DVD Video players, you can’t format it as a DVD-ROM. 
6. Burn using Disc-at-Once mode whenever practical.  Track-At-Once mode is meant to help avoid buffer underruns on slower computers, but causes overlapping sectors in between tracks called "link transitions".  
7. Turn off other programs, including screen savers.  If you have problems with buffer underruns, you should choose a slower writing speed.  You should also turn off virus protection software.  For the best results, don’t run any other programs while you are burning.
8. Keep your hard disks defragmented.  While this is a good idea for better PC performance in general, it is an especially good idea for people who do a lot of audio or video editing, or other multimedia production.  If your hard disk is highly fragmented, it will have to seek to many sections in order to read and write each file.  This will slow down the transfer rate of data to and from the hard drive, and it could cause buffer underruns when burning.
9. While higher speed recording saves time and generally results in great discs, slower speed recordings may give you your best chance for a higher quality disc, with lower error rates. 
10. Always use a felt-tip marker to write on the top of your recordable discs.  Never use a ball-point pen, or roller ball pen.  These pens could damage the recording layer, which is just beneath the printed top layer.
11. Don’t leave open sessions.  Unless you are storing data in increments to a recordable disc (using multi-session recording), you should "finalize" your recording.  This will allow your burning software program to write a lead-out to the end of your session.  This is necessary for compatibility with audio CD players.