"the burn failed because of a medium write error"

I am also having the same problem. Burning DVDs has been 50-50 as well. I will try reducing speed- that ***** though!

Tried to burn a bunch of MP3s to a DVD, formatting as a data disk...had laser calibration errors and medium write failures all the way down to 8X before I gave up in disgust. This is absolutely ridiculous. There are enough of us suffering from this that it HAS to be some sort of software error...I can't believe all of our drives are failing at the same time!

Missed this one before...basically a brand new MacBook...still having trouble?

Just checked...no updates yet.

I'm having this error AND the other one "Device failed to respond properly -- unable to recover or retry. Everything was fine until updates a month ago -- I'm on a G5 20" imac 10.3.9 with a Matshu. superdrive.

I'm amazed Apple hasn't addressed this...

Reading all of this is frustrating. Burning a music cd should not be this difficult! Expensive computer. I don't want to play around with which speed will work to listen to music in my car. Really! Why all the problems. I burned a music cd on a notebook mac black lap top this year; friends; and they never used the burn feature to make a music cd. I had no clue what i was doing. stuck a black cd in and pressed burn; burned 5 songs, and i still listen to cd today; no problems.
now i own my own mac desk top, and i can't seem to make a music cd to play in my car. I am wasting money on blank cd's trying to get it right. frustated!

Went to Smalldog Electronics today...big Apple dealer here in Vermont. The tech department said that they have never heard of such an error before; all he could suggest was upgrading media quality...i.e. Memorex etc for discs.

Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, cuz we're ALL using low quality dollar store disks...

Er, nope. It was a keyboard fix.

Burning is still not available after 2 months.

This is getting to becoming a major issue with Christmas next week and no traditional CD's of family photos to hand out to parents and grand parents.

Come on Apple admit you screwed up and fix this issue.

Even my neighbour who has upgraded is having the same issue so its hardly isolated.

Lucky you 😉

I wish it had fixed mine.

The rumoured fixes in 10.5.2 make no mention of the CD / DVD burning issues. So I guess we will all have to wait till January to see if it does finally cure this bug.

Hey i'm a new apple user and i had the same problem when I first tried to burn a cd, but then a put another one in and was able to burn two in a row...i hope i'm not jinxing myself but hopefully it will continue working. I glad it did because i dont even know where to go to change the speed. anyways i hope they hurry up and put something out the fix the error because this is bull to buy an apple because of its reputation and know i can't burn a simple cd...

In order to change burn speed (just so you know), go to iTunes Preferences, choose "Advanced" then "Burning", then you can set your burnspeed right there.

Is anyone else with the burning problems seeing this issue too ?

Insert a commercially produced CD (audio CD for example) and the drive reads it fine.

Insert a CDR burned by any machine and the drive thinks its blank.

Drive will still burn DVD's no problem at all.