This is very basic, I am sure. However, I am incompetent and a loser. I used NERO to quick-erase the CDRW to record different music on it. NERO then said that the disc was not empty and gave me some options, and somehow I ended up reformatted it to a data CD. Then InCD started hating and gave me all sorts of trouble. Now I cannot figure out how to change the format back to audio. Is this even possible?

in nero, try doing a full erase OR try doing a quick erase at a slower speed. what media are you using? sounds like it might not be that good of quality.


btw:
ERASE = "wipe clean"/blank the disk
FORMAT = erase the disc and prepares it for packet-writing

nero only erases
inCD formats (maybe it erases too ... not sure since i don't use inCD)
you do not format a CDRW to prepare it to burn as an audio disc; you just need to erase it

hope that clarifies the terms

(in reply to Taylor)

Taylor:

rabbit's explanations are correct, but let me add some points.

If you wish to re-use a CD-RW disc in Nero for recording audio or data, you must first do either Full Erase or Quick Erase in Nero. Nominally there is little difference between these two actions (except that the quick one takes less time, whereas the second one "wears out" the disc more), but in practice many users report that Full Erase tends to ensure better quality for subsequent recordings. Hence some users employ a cycle of several quick erasures followed by full erasure for a given disc.

Now, if you get errors in InCD for a certain disc, and you still want to use this disc in InCD, you could try running a quick or full format in InCD, but most users get better results by doing Full Erase in Nero first and then InCD (full) format.

Similarly, if you want to run InCD on a disc previously recorded by Nero, you should do Full Erase before running InCD format.

Finally, to use an InCD formatted disc in Nero, you should run Full Erase first.

Most users keep separate sets of discs for Nero and InCD.

Note that each CD-RW disc can only handle a finite number of rewrites. Manufactures may claim 1000 or more, but most users say 100 is a more realistic estimate. Yet there are tests showing that some poor media may become unusable after just 5 rewrites. To check your discs, you may run Nero CD Speed| Extra| CD Quality and Scandisc.

(in reply to Taylor)

Not sure about trhe merit of doing quick and full erases?

As I understand it, QUICK erases the TOC area only, and allows the rest to just be overwritten.

FULL erases the entire CD - so combining quick and full just increases wear on the TOC - if you use it for audio (and not all players accept CD-RW) then the consistent starting condition from a full erase may produce lower T3 jitter than the uncertain state of previous data being overwritten. If you think you need a full, and can stand the wait, do a full, otherwise do a quick.

Full erase also seems to be easier to achieve, if there is some problem - I had media that was corrupted by a drive it didn't work well in, and it hung the drive on a quick erase, but it would full erase ok - and then worked satisfactorily after that.
It appears the media must be readable, for quick erase to be successful.

(in reply to Taylor)

Matthew:

Of course there is no point in combining quick and full erasures; a cycle means quick erase, recording, ..., quick erase, recording, full erase, recording.

Could you expand your explanation of why a full erase may produce lower T3 jitter?

As far as I know, to do Full Erase, Nero simply issues the MMC BLANK command to the burner with type "Blank the disc". The erasing action performed by this command is a Logical Erase, which apparently means that all bytes are overwritten with mode 0 data (mostly 0x00 bytes), but interleaving, CIRC and EFM encoding still occur. This is different from a Physical Erase, for which apparently there is no MMC command. Thus I don't really know why Full Erase should produce a "better" starting condition than Quick Erase does, since afterwards direct overwriting is employed in both cases. I'd like to find some plausible explanation for the empirical observation that full erases tend to produce better subsequent recordings.

(in reply to Taylor)

I was assuming that this applied
http://www.roxio.com/en/support/cdr/howrecworks.html

The "annealing" process - a "physical" erase.

And therefore, no deviations to the different response of areas in crystalline or amorphous state.

I would suspect the properties of an overwrite to vary slightly, depending on the initial state - that seems like the only way the erase condition could influence the result.

If the full erase is only LOGICAL, then it's still rewriting over a random condition.

The only other thing I can think of, is if a full erase is performed immediately prior to writing, the media will have had plenty of time to temperature equalise.

Other than the heating effect from the write laser, equalisation would also occur if a "test and burn" was used - THAT might be a way to pin it down....

Full erase immediately before,
Full erased earlier,
Quick erased, and burned with test before.

If my temperature equalisation idea is right, the second one should be the worst?

(in reply to Taylor)

Matthew:

Unfortunately sites like Roxio's only describe physical erase, whereas the Orange Book is too expensive. My information came from some guys who can access it, but I can't ask them for more extensive quotes.

After a logical erase, the physical pattern is not really random (barring writing errors). I have not tried, but in principle one should be able to figure out how it should look like in terms of channel bits, and hence pits and lands.

I would not expect significant differences depending on whether a full erase is done just before subsequent overwriting or earlier. Well, the disc is hotter in the first case, but the time constants for phase transitions are so small that the state of an area that was overwritten several minutes ago should be close to the state reached after several hours or days (i.e., most changes occur within at most seconds after overwriting).

Doing a "test burn" after a quick erase shouldn't matter much, since no real writing occurs for test burns.

Of course, these are just my guesses, but it would be extremely hard to confirm any speculation without access to professional disc testing equipment.

(in reply to Taylor)