failed disc burn

This place never fails to help me out, I too changed the burn speed to 8 and the thing started working.

I had, and it spit them back out at me. I can watch DVD's fine. So I switched to Roxio Toast until it started spitting back out at me. It then told me the burner could not achieve speed, tried lowering to 8, and it worked for one, and then roxio died on me.

It was strange, I saw this oddball fix involving the International settings on one of the boards, and after following the directions and a reboot, it now works.

Also, does anyone know if the latest Itunes patch does anything for the current problems? My Mac Mini is only two years old, and it should not need a new drive. That would be rather pathetic if it did. I had an older mac tower that lasted 10 years in my family before being retired. I would hope this would last at least 5.

Dan Bergstrom wrote:
"The attempt to burn a disc failed. The device failed to calibrate the laser power level for this media."

Haven't you ever heard that 'Speed KILLS' ! (just joking)

I am getting this message when trying to burn to Maxell CD-R 80min 700MB cd's. I have slowed the burn speed down to 1x, and I guess I can experiment with burn speeds, but I've never had this problem before. Any comments on Maxell CD's? Any suggestions for best "Preferred Burn Speed" setting?

And I'm sorry to tell you that experimenting with burn speeds just wasted your time.

But the facts are ...

Faster is not better, it just 'burns' quicker.
Slower is better, it just takes longer to 'burn'.
Always select the slowest burn speed to insure the best quality.
Always verify the 'burn'. This doubles the 'burn' time but it's worth the 'piece of mind'.
If your 'burning' music use blank CD's labeled 'Music', 'Digital Audio' or 'DA'.
Higher burn speeds will slightly degrade the sound timbre.
(You may not be able to detect any deficiencies but I can proved that it does. If you don't believe me I'll can E-Mail you the proof.)

And I must be the ONLY ONE that knows that your Mac can tell you the burn speeds of a blank CD/DVD. After it's mounted in the Super Drive and your ready to 'burn' it, open the 'System Profiler' Application and select 'Disc Burning'. The 'burning speeds' of that CD/DVD is listed under 'Media'.

I hope this helps and may you always be a happy burner

Good Luck.
!http://homepage.mac.com/buzzlightgear/Buzz.tiff!
Buzz
(second post!)

Buzz Lightgear wrote:
If your 'burning' music use blank CD's labeled 'Music', 'Digital Audio' or 'DA'.

Which is a waste of money and does not do anything. "Digital Audio" CDs are nothing more than CDs on which a tax was paid to the music industry and a bit or two is set in the ROM portion of the CDR to indicate this. Other than that, there is absolutely no difference between a "data" CDR and a "Music" CDR.
These CDs exist because back around the late 90's time frame when manufactures like Philips, SOny and some others came out with CD Recorders that were a normal stereo system component (a CD "deck") and could record like an old Cassette tape deck. Some had two drawers to do "dubbing". The music industry was up in arms about pirating and people making digital copies of their CDs for their friends and the usual hysterical soundings from the music industry weasels.
So in order for these player/recorders to hit the market and avoid long court battles with the music weasels, they agreed to implement a system (Serial Copy Management System (SCMS)) that only special "Digital Audio" CDs could be used in their recorders which the makers of the blanks would pay a royalty on each that went to the music industry. These recorders would not use off the shelf CDRs without the special "DA" bits set in the ROM.
The same sort of royalty system has been used for other high end audio formats like Sony Minidisc, DAT, etc. all have this built in royalty payment system prepaid on blank media used for them.
Patrick

I just started having this same problem several days ago. I have never had issues burning discs, and recently upgraded to Leopard several months ago with no hitches in iTunes at all. I have not changed the brand or type of disc to burn; (I've been using TDK 80 min 700MB CD-R discs) all of a sudden while it was 'preparing' the disc, a box pops up and reads 'canceling disc burn' and then it would eject it, after which another box appears and reads 'attempt to burn a disc failed. An unknown error occurred (-50).' Since it's unknown by iTunes than I certainly have no idea what to do since no additional info is provided. I also recently upgraded to iTunes 7.7. but in all fairness this started happening before I did that. At this point I have no idea if it's iTunes or the drive itself. Any ideas?
Thanks...

Same thing is happening to me. It started after an update/upgrade. I've tried different kinds of discs. Sometimes, but only once out of 18-20 attempts, it will burn. The machine burns other files onto discs no problem, from Finder. But iTunes is all screwed up. The blank disc doesn't even show up in the iTunes window where it used to... When is Apple going to fix this?

I started having the same problem today.I have had this laptopfor almost 2 years and never had any problems burning anything. This afternoon I was able to burn 1 audio CD using Sony CD-R, 700 mb and then I could not burn anything else. I read all messages here and tried different speeds and kept getting different error messages. Finally i got down to 12x and now it works! Just completed burning 2 CDs....at last, it just took hours....literally. I hope Apple fixes this soon, this is not what I bought my mac for.