Firewire CD Burner

[studionut]

How much did you guys pay for the QPS 12x10x32?

[bronson]

the qps 16x10x40 on compusa.com is 400 bucks. I'm thinking of picking it up this weekend. It looks like a number of you like this product - can anyone suggest a place to get it for a lower price -- or does anyone recommend that i don't buy the Que! fire?

G4, 384 Megs Ram, 30 Gig hard drive, 001.

thanks in advance
++bronson

[gclef]

QPS Que does truly work flawlessly out of the box. I switch it between my mac and PC and it's great on both.

[Lotus54]

Check out the APS plus drives. Less money and I've had quite good luck.
www.apstech.com

firewire and USB in one box.
I have the 12/10/32 it was $299.
Mark

Originally posted by bronson:
the qps 16x10x40 on compusa.com is 400 bucks. I.....

G4, 384 Megs Ram, 30 Gig hard drive, 001.

thanks in advance
++bronson

[onemanband]

Bronson

www.pcwarehouse.com/pcw

QPS 16x for $329 after rebate. Or shop net for QPS 12x burner for $189 after rebate. Bought one 2 weeks ago, can't remember where, sorry. Check Dealmac.com

Good Luck

Bob

[This message has been edited by onemanband (edited February 23, 2001).]

[Avid]

DJ Burt:

I have one of the new Yamaha 2100 firewire 16x-10x-40x drives, purchased last week from www.firewiredirect.com
www.macsales.com (Other World Computing) has them listed as well, but did not have an immediate shipping date when I checked a couple of weeks ago.

Haven't had a chance to use it much yet, but on my Powerbook G3/500, it will burn at 16x off of the hard drive, but has to be slowed down quite a bit (4x) to burn directly reading from the PB internal CD/DVD drive.

Different distributors use different internal mechanisms. The only 16x burners that I know of at the moment that are shipping are the Yamaha and Sanyo drives. The Sanyo is kind of interesting because they have something called "burn-proof" technology that an APS sales person thought allowed you to use other applications while burning. I've seen confirmation that this works on the PC, but haven't seen anyone confirm that it works on a mac. I've yet to see any multi-tasking allowed while burning CDs on a mac, personally. I went with the Yamaha because it had some really nice specs, including an 8 MB buffer, 4 times higher than anything else I've seen.

There is a new list with the release of iTunes v1.1 of supported third party burners, including some of the mechanisms used by different distributors:
http://www.apple.com/itunes/compatibility/

A couple of random notes that might save someone else some trouble:

Installing iTunes 1.1 puts a couple of items in your Extensions folder:
* Authoring Support
* Firewire Authoring Support

These have to be enabled if you want to use iTunes to burn to a supported firewire burner.

These have to be DISABLED if you want to use Toast, like I do with Toast Deluxe 4.1.2.

I initially had problems getting Toast to recognize the Yamaha 2100. A quick call to Firewire Direct tech support solved the problem. Conflict Catcher lists this Mac OS 9.1 extension:

* FireWire Enabler (v2.7)

I don't know about apple's Extension Manager, but Conflict Catcher does NOT show:

* FireWire Support (v2.7)

which had to be moved from the Extensions (Disabled) folder manually to the active Extensions folder.

The only Toast extensions I have loaded are:
* Toast Firewire Support
(needed to recognize the burner)
and
* Toast CD Reader
since the 40x reader on the firewire drive is much faster than the Powerbook CD/DVD drive.

By the way, don't mistake all this for actual knowledge, or official Digi recommendations, just stuff I've found on my personal system.

Bleeding Edge Bruce

[DJ Burt]

Thanks Bruce for your reply. I was worried that I may come across some problems using the new firewire drive, compatibiltiy etc with software and so on. Your advice will be heeded!

Cheers,

Dj

[flytrap]

I tried the QPS QUE Writer and I had to send it back after it gave me 40 bad burns on good media.(I like fuji cd-r) Then I got a Yamaha that works great.
At home I use my trusty old(by today's standards) Sony CRX 120 E/X 4X/4X/12X
along with toast and retrospect.
One big cautionary note: your media can make or break you. Don't skimp here!

[kbahjat]

I've also been using the Yamaha 2100 drive in a firewire case without a hitch. 2 thngs to consider are:

1) Do you use your DVD-ROM drive in your G4? If not, pull it out an put an internal EIDE CD-R in its place. Much cheaper. You can pick up the Yamaha 16x EIDE for under $200, I believe.

2) I have had poor luck getting Jam to burn CDs at 16x. Toast seems to work better doing audio at 16x, but I thought they shared the same extensions. So this is a little confusing. Someone told me Jam doesn't properly utilize the buffer built into the CD-R drive (the Yamaha has an 8 Mb buffer built into avoid the dreaded "buffer underrun" error. Worse case scenario is you burn at 12x, which has never had a problem. That's still darn fast. I'm guessing tha tthe media quality probably has to catch up to the 16x burn speeds (despite the "16x certified" on the label).

Good luck.

[bronson]

After reading the problems people have with the 16X I'm wondering: should I be spending the extra bucks for the QPS 16X or should I just go with the QPS 12X. I've never used a CD burner before, so I don't know if there's really a difference.

Another quick question: since my new G4 doesn't have a disk drive (just DVD), am I going to be able to back up files on my new CD burner? Will I be able to store my 001 projects on CD in data form (with track info.)? How do a take a work in progress from my 001 to a friends 001?

thanks
++bronson