[Fred Flange]

Hi,

I have a big problem with the Music Disc Creator component in RecordNow 9 Music Lab Premier.

Having spent the last five weeks (!) carefully assembling a DVD Music Disc project containing no fewer than 479 tracks, I now discover that whenever I try to actually burn the project, the program throws up a runtime error message after copying only just over 20 tracks onto the DVD.

The error message is titled 'Microsoft Visual C++ Runtime Library' and, as well as the red circle with the white cross, it reads as follows:-
-----------------
Runtime Error!
Program: C\Program Files\Roxio\Audio Master 9\MusicDiscCreator9.exe
This application has requested the Runtime to terminate it in an unusual way.Please contact the application's support team for more information.
-----------------
There is of course no option but to click on the OK button, which shuts down Music Disc Creator but, curiously, leaves the disc in the DVD drive spinning. In fact, the disc keeps spinning and will not eject; I have to use the pin-hole in the drive to force-eject it.

Has anyone come across this behaviour before? Is there a solution?

Incidentally, when I was about half way through assembling the project, I made a test disc to see if it worked, and that burned fine on the same brand of disc I am trying to burn the whole project onto, so I don't think that disc brand is the issue here.

The main difference between the two burns is the size of the project.

The test disc was only half full, but my finished project shows an estimated free space on a 4.7GB disc as just 26.26MB. Is this cutting it a bit fine, and would having too much data throw up the sort of error message and drive behaviour that I am experiencing?

I am running Windows XP Media Center Edition with SP2 on a Dell Insipron 6400 witn Intel T5500 & 1.66GHz, with 1GB of RAM. I have Windows Media Player 11 installed, (seems relevant to mention that after reading another thread), but it was installed when I did the test disc successfully, which suggests that it is not affecting my DVD burning.

Thanks in advance,
Fred

This post has been edited by Fred Flange: 09 November 2007 - 09:23 AM

[cdanteek]

Fred Flange,

The disc limits are 4464mb that leaves 18mb as a safe buffer on the outer edge of the disc. You mention 4.7gb that is 4464mb! If you have a RW disc try the project with more estimated free space, less files in your project.

cd

[Fred Flange]

Thanks for that, but unfortunately it hasn't helped.

I have reduced the size of the project so that the estimated free space reading shows in excess of 300MB when the 4.7GB option is selected. This, I figure, makes allowances for the available space of only 4.4GB, which is what appears in the burn dialog box when I insert a disc.

I tried using a DVD-RW disc, but the same problem occurs. I have ruined a further three DVD+Rs as well.

All the symptoms when it crashes point towards a lack of memory (everything goes very slow, the cursor is jerky, and windows build gradually from blank white shapes) but I have 1GB of RAM installed, which ought to be enough with XP, surely?

After the penultimate crash, Windows announced it was increasing the size of the virtual memory page, which again seems to point towards lack of memory...

The crash always seemed to occur when the burn reached the same track, so I deleted it from the project and then re-inserted it again. After that (and the VM increase of course) the burn did progress past that point, but it still crashed a bit further on.

Anyone have any clue what is going on here please?

Cheers

[Brendon]

Can you go through your burn options and write to an image rather than burning to a disc? This will save coasters in the meantime. Once you get safely through that step, burn the image to plastic.

I'm wondering if you're not running into some track(s) which the program doesn't like for some reason. I have had this happen with other software where a bad audio track threw the program into a loop which ran using 100% of the CPU until all available memory was used and it crashed. Persist with this deleting of problem tracks and see if the program will then completely write the image.

[Fred Flange]

Can you go through your burn options and write to an image rather than burning to a disc? This will save coasters in the meantime. Once you get safely through that step, burn the image to plastic.

I'm wondering if you're not running into some track(s) which the program doesn't like for some reason. I have had this happen with other software where a bad audio track threw the program into a loop which ran using 100% of the CPU until all available memory was used and it crashed. Persist with this deleting of problem tracks and see if the program will then completely write the image.

Brendon,

Thanks for the advice regarding writing to an image, I'll give that a go. My only concern is that I've used up so much space on my hard drive with all the .wav files I saved for the project that I may not have enough left for the disc image. (My plan was to delete the .wav files -or maybe just convert them into something more compressed- once I'd safely burned the project onto a disc.

As regards problem tracks, I think you might be onto something there too. As I said before, the program kept crashing when it reached one particular track, (Track 22, Phil Collins' Another Day In Paradise, as it happens), so I tried deleting that from my project and then re-adding it again in the same place. My next stab at burning did at least seem to get past track 22, suggesting that it was indeed a 'problem track' but it crashed a bit further on through the project.

It would be interesting to know what causes a 'problem track', because the test disc I successfully burned half way through (see my OP) had no problems with this particular track at all.

A couple of questions you may be able to assist with, please:

I still haven't completely got my head around the apparent discrepancy between the 4.7GB capacity of a DVD disc, (mentioned on the DVD itself and in the 'Estimated space remaining' bit at the bottom of the Creator program), and the 4.4GB which the burning options dialog box tells me is available when I put my disc in. Do I really need to allow an extra 300MB estimated free space to compensate for the discrepancy, or does the program already take that into account?

Is there anywhere in the program to see the actual size of the project, rather than just the 'estimated free space available'?

Thanks again,
Fred