Poll: How many CD's have you burned?

[MacRumors]

Vote: Poll: How many CD's have you burned? (http://www.macpolls.com/?poll_id=159&ref=forums.macrumors.com)

[ShaolinMiddleFinger]

Dang! That's a lot....probably between a hundred and a thousand.

Has anyone ever noticed that information keeps on getting larger.....

[punter]

Another question is: How many burns do your burners last? I seem to go through a burner for about 200 burns with my old pc and now with my external cd burner.

They seem to become really inconsistent and eventually don't spin up. I hope this is just not my luck.

None of my cd burners have been an apple product.

[Centris 650]

Man, I've lost count over the years! Between burning for music, back-ups and data transport I'd say I've done quite a bit. If you include all the cd's I've burned for work...whoa. I was, however, conservative and said 101-1000.

(I'm still a-itchin' to burn some DVD's though!)

[gotohamish]

Originally posted by punter
Another question is: How many burns do your burners last? I seem to go through a burner for about 200 burns with my old pc and now with my external cd burner.

They seem to become really inconsistent and eventually don't spin up. I hope this is just not my luck.

None of my cd burners have been an apple product.

That's not too good for a product life time. I did a CD release for www.Juxt.co.uk and that was 200 copies to start with. I did them in two days with my 48x Lite-On in a FW case. And I must've burnt 4x that amount since I've had the writer.

Which models have you been thru? The sound like they should be avoided!

[saint]

I didn't realise I was in such a small minority by not having a CD burner.

What do y'all mostly burn CDs for?
Music? Backups? File Transfer?

[edesignuk]

Originally posted by saint
What do y'all mostly burn CDs for?
Music? Backups? File Transfer?
er...yeah..."backups" ;) :p

[gotohamish]

Originally posted by saint
I didn't realise I was in such a small minority by not having a CD burner.

What do y'all mostly burn CDs for?
Music? Backups? File Transfer?

Music and backups, and for portfolios too.

I'm tending to use DVDs more for Backups now though.

[Billicus]

I've burned between 1 and 100, probably ~ 60. I've burned a lot of Music CD's, but I've burned equally as many Bacup CD's. On account of the fact that my iMac has a 13GB HD, it fills up fast between the music and the files and the applications. I'm consantly cleaning the hard drive out to make space for new stuff.:D

[AllenPSU]

Burn about one a day for normal admin and then a bunch for distribution every month or so.

[idkew]

Originally posted by punter
Another question is: How many burns do your burners last? I seem to go through a burner for about 200 burns with my old pc and now with my external cd burner.

They seem to become really inconsistent and eventually don't spin up. I hope this is just not my luck.

None of my cd burners have been an apple product.

my first teac 4x burner did about 300 burns before i sold it. rarely made coasters also. i liked it a lot, just with it were faster. that is why i sold it.

[Bear]

Originally posted by saint
I didn't realise I was in such a small minority by not having a CD burner.

What do y'all mostly burn CDs for?
Music? Backups? File Transfer? Among other things, I use them for: Backups Custom Audio CD's for the car File Transfer Droping pictures off at a photolab

[Bear]

Originally posted by punter
Another question is: How many burns do your burners last? I seem to go through a burner for about 200 burns with my old pc and now with my external cd burner.

They seem to become really inconsistent and eventually don't spin up. I hope this is just not my luck.

None of my cd burners have been an apple product.
I top have had mixed luck with burners on PC's in the past. I tended to get no more than 2 years of life out of them. Remember it's not just how many you burn, it's also how many pieces of optical media you read in a drive as well.

Optical drive lifespan is one of the reasons I chose to get Apple Care for my Macs. Between that and hard drives, the Apple Care will probably pay for itself.

[jkojima]

In addition to the uses posted here, I've also used CD-Rs as a file transfer mechanism when all else fails. Because they're so cheap, what's a few cents for a disc even if you only burn a couple killobytes worth of Word files.

I've also used my burner to produce interactive resumes/ portfolios, and test-burns of commercial CD-ROMs.

Until this poll I hadn't before realized how many CDs I've gone through, but when I think back to all the spindles I've used... woah.

[wdlove]

I don't have a CD burner on my Power Mac. Last summer while at MWNY I did use my wife's iBook so I could keep up on some items. I did burn ~10 CD's, backed up daily onto 2 CD's.

[iElvis]

Well on my comp...probably slightly over 100. I do mostly backups of my stuff. But at my church i'm part of the audio production. I'm usally in charge of the CD's...so with those machines i've easily made over 1000 in one day.

[AlphaTech]

I figure I have burned between 500 and 1000 cd's in the past few years. I used to create the utility cd for work, so I would have to burn about 6 copies of each cd when I did an update. I also would occasionally back up files to cd, at least until we got a tape drive to use (easier to run the tape overnight/weekend then try to burn 40GB to cd's).

For my own uses, I burn backup cd's on occasion as well as music, as either mp3 cd's or audio cd's. My truck's audio system accepts both audio and mp3 cd's which makes things sweet. Especially when I need to drive for more then 30 minutes. ;) I've made a few compilation cd's in the mp3 format, and they work out great. Especially since I can fit many hours of music onto a single disc as mp3.

As for burners, I've always had excellent results with the QPS burners. I've owned three different ones over the years, always selling the older/slower one before getting the newer/faster one. None of the people I have sold the old burners to have ever had problems with them. I'm getting ready to purchase a LaCie 52x burner in the next couple of weeks, even though my 32x QPS burner is fully functional. I could attach both burners to my TiBook (via FireWire) and burn to both of them at the same time (Toast Ti rocks).

I've also had a tdk burner years ago, but it sucked. I had a Yamaha burner as well, but it didn't do what I needed to (back in the early days of cd burners). I might pick up some Plextor burners when I build the next system, have them on a SCSI chain along with the Plextor source drive so that I can have a duping station inside the pc. That's one project on the back burner for now...Then again, LaCie has some sweet duplication burners now, both cd and dvd. :D

BTW, I've never gotten a coaster out of the QPS burner, while I did out of the older tdk burner. The Yamaha was decent for it's day, but just didn't do what I needed at the time (Mac compatibility back then).

A

[Bob Knob]

My first burner was a 1x unit back in 1993, it cost $3,500 and blanks went for $30 each. At the time I had my own small mastering house and was even doing discs for the Mouse as they converted to CD for background music at the parks. The bummer was that the software from "A well know audio editing company" was very unstable, in fact they released it, and then promptly removed it from sales leaving a number of us to be post-release beta testers for almost a year. Imagine putting in a blank, clicking write, and having it make a burn the length of one rotation and then have an error and spit out a $30 coaster... one after another, after another. Or waiting an hour for the disc to burn only to have an unknown error while "finishing" the disc... another $30 coaster.
I always get a kick when people bitch about the prices of x,y and z, or that some version 1 program isn't 100% stable with their particular setup :)
I must have burt in the 10,000s by now (or even much higher), I have gone through a case of 100 disc spindles in a month on a few occasions.
BTW, my 1x burner lasted a little over one and a half years, and I still have it in the closet. I have never had one of my built in burners on any of my Macs go bad and burn masters and archives on them daily. But mostly I use stand alone mass duplicators.

[-hh]

Originally posted by saint
I didn't realise I was in such a small minority by not having a CD burner.

What do y'all mostly burn CDs for?
Music? Backups? File Transfer?


Probably a more interesting question would be:

"Not counting Music or pirated software, how many CD's have you burned?"


For that survey question, I'd bet that most peoples' answers would be in the 20-100 range.


-hh

[Giaguara]

is "burned" as "copied" or burned "copied badly, ruined the cd"?

"copied", hundreds probably.

"ruined the cd", probably 50 - 150.

[hvfsl]

I have set fire to more CDs than I have 'burnt', but I mainly burn DVDs now (not ilegal ones).

[AlphaTech]

Originally posted by -hh
Probably a more interesting question would be:

"Not counting Music or pirated software, how many CD's have you burned?"


For that survey question, I'd bet that most peoples' answers would be in the 20-100 range.


-hh

Even factoring that into my burn count, it remains. I can only count a handfull of cd's that were of the questionable nature. Most of those were for windows software as well. Typically a game so that I can try it out before purchasing it (if it proved itself worthy). Demo's can really suck at times. Especially when the demo is based on a pre-release version of the game and full of bugs. :rolleyes:

[NavyIntel007]

Dude, I can't even tell you how much I've burned, not that many though. With my PC I had a 4X burner, I thought I was big stuff. I got an external 12X for my mac and I thought I was living the highlife. Now they have 52X and I feel like I got left behind.

[liloconf]

Originally posted by saint
I didn't realise I was in such a small minority by not having a CD burner.

What do y'all mostly burn CDs for?
Music? Backups? File Transfer?

Porn.....someone had to admit it!!!

[MacFan25]

I really haven't burned that many CDs. I have probably only burned like 10.

[scem0]

Originally posted by liloconf
Porn.....someone had to admit it!!!

everything is for porn...

;)

[WinterMute]

Must be thousands, use em to back-up ProTools sessions.

[runningman]

Not enough.
Also have made quite a few coasters.

[janey]

1000+ cd's and dvd's burned, about 10 coasters...matches my table though :D

[GeneR]

But who can say for certain? I'd rather have a DVD burner. Someday... :D