Time columnist Chris Taylor recently lamented the difficulty he had getting CD-Rs to burn correctly on his PC. His comments come in a recent column entitled The Burning (CD-R) Question. Taylor noted, however, that iTunes worked, and quite well.
Taylor said that he’d bought a CD-R drive for his Windows computer a month ago, and has regularly been churning out “coasters” — CD-Rs that were, for whatever reason, not recorded correctly — ever since then. The software that came with the drive, a Hewlett-Packard 8200 model, wouldn’t convert his audio files and didn’t do a very good job laying them down on CD-R, either.
Next Taylor tried Roxio’s Easy CD Creator 5, and had problems, despite updating the software to a new version. Musicmatch.com and Real.com’s CD mastering software likewise let him down.
Then Taylor turned to a Mac equipped with iTunes. The result? “My first iTunes CD was so easy to make and so glitch free, I had tears in my eyes,” said Taylor. “Tears, because all my music is on the other computer.”
Now the columnist is trying to figure out creative uses for all the coasters he wasted on his PC.