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I wonder if anyone can help. I am trying to burn a cd from my Apple laptop from an itunes playlist. Everytime I try to do it a message comes up saying the Device failed to calibrate the laser power level for this media. Can anyone help? I've done it before but not with this type of CD. Am I possibly using the wrong kind. The ones which I have are TDK CD-R Audio. Is this the wrong type? Or am I doing something else wrong?

Any advice would be appreciated.

Whenever i've seen that error in the past it's been a dead drive.

You say you have used it before, have you any other media to try and burn to?

Hi Rune, no I haven't any other way of doing it. Is a dead drive something which is fixable. I can still play CDs so would that indicate, that the drive is ok?

This might not apply to Apples but a PC with Windows XP doesn't seem to like burning to Audio CDs. I've tried to use Audio Rewritables for Data and XPs own burning software and for that matter Nero Burning all fail to burn to them.

Try a data CD before you condem the drive

It definitely could be a problem with the drive because you can read CDs ok but are unable to write. What I would do is try a different brand of CD-R and/or try writing some data to a CD-RW. Another thing it could be is dust inside the drive, so it may be worth putting a cleaning CD in it.

Thanks guys, I think the problem may be the CD as the last time (when I used a different CD) there was no problem. Can you recommend which CD I could try. Sorry Larry, I dont really understand what a date CD is?

You will need a CD-RW ellie to write data files to, I have always used Sony ones. I think Verbatim are quite cheap if you need some just to test with. I got something like 10 for £3 from PCWorld.

An Audio CDR contains extra information which normal CDR doesn't and this might be why they don't work well when they are not used with audio recorders.

If for instance you owned an external CD Audio recorder then you would need to use Audio CDR as the recorder wouldn't let you record on normal CDR. Audio CDR tend to cost more than the normal DATA type. It's easy to tell them apart as the Audio type say Audio on both the CD and the case.

I normally pay around £11 for 100 normal CDR Data discs. I haven't bought audio ones for many years as when I had by Audio recorder a nice German company produced a Chip that when fitted insdie allowed data CDR to be used like audio ones.

The difference is to do with copywrite I think so you pay a premium towards this when you pay the extra for the Audio ones.