I've got an old Yamaha CDR-100 recorder here at work.

The thing is external SCSI, older than dirt, built like a tank, only 4x recording speed, but... most importantly... it's dead-reliable. I can burn disc after disc on this thing and it never makes a coaster. Every disc we make with this thing always works for everyone we send them to. To me, that's critical, and worth any amount of trouble that I have to go to in order to maintain that level of reliability.

This drive has a problem, though. It only likes to burn dark blue or dark green media made with cyanine. It won't reliably burn on media made with the lighter or transparent dyes. The "bad" discs for me are the ones that appear to be a very light shade of greenish-gold, instead of the more desirable dark blue or green.

The companies that manufacture the blank CD-R media have all been slowly adopting the light media instead of the dark media. One by one, each brand of blank disk has gone onto my "do not buy" list. A long time ago, I used to know which brands were good and which were not, but today I've got no clue what I'm gonna get when I open the package. Our supply of dark green Fuji discs just ran out, and when we got a replacement spindle of 100 Fuji discs, they were all the light stuff.

Does anyone know of any brand or supplier that can guarantee that I get the dark green cyanine media?

Googling hasn't been helpful... Lots of sites talk about the various dye types. There are even sites which try to list which manufacturers use which dye types, but when I look at those lists, they are hopelessly out of date. For instance, they may say a given brand is the "good" dye type, but I know from direct experience that the company changed dyes 15 months ago. And in any case, none of the sites I saw actually said they would sell me a media that was definitely the cyanine dye type.

Any ideas?

On the old PC I left at my parents place, it has a CDR-102 which is a 2x version of the CDR-100. I've never had any problems regarding light or dark media. What happens when you put a light coloured dye in?

It either burns a coaster, or it refuses to even load the light media, ejecting it immediately.

i agree
ive never had a coaster and ive burned all my discs at 52x. i am colour blind, but id bet that the colour of the dye didnt matter

Hmmm... I am wondering if it is the chemical formulation or if it is capacity. Most CDR media today is 80 minute, stretching the true standard for the "color book" formats. You might want to see if 74 minute media, even the light green and silver, will work in the player. Also, a lot of the newer media is formulated for high speed writing and will not work well below 4x or even 16x.

If not, my personal preference for media is CDR Outlet. I looked, though, and did not see the older formulations. Of course you realize what the CDR FAQ says about identifying media by color...

I know what the CDR FAQ says by identifying media by color, but he meant that saying a given color was "better" than another didn't make sense, which is true. He also says that it's true certain media won't work in certain burners or players, and that you need to test each brand of media in your particular player to know whether it'll work. Over the years I've done enough testing to know exactly what media works in this burner. What I've found is that once I'm using the right media, everything we make on this burner works on all players period. Unlike many newer IDE CDR drives, where you might make a disc that plays OK on your test machine, but send it to a customer and they get a read-error.

Those who accuse this burner of being unreliable just because it's picky about what kind of dye you feed it are missing the point. Once I feed it the right media, I'm confident that the discs I make can be sent to anyone, anywhere in the world, and it will work. I can't do that with just any burner. When I put the disc into that fedex envelope, I need to know it's not gonna come back. The only times we've ever had discs come back is when we use one of the other "newer" burners here in the office.

Your comment about 74-minute versus 80-minute media isn't applicable because the only difference between the two is how far out towards the edge of the disc the laser will go, it has nothing to do with the dye. And this is an older burner that won't even burn past the 74-minute boundary.

No worries. I know what it is like to put together masters that need to be shipped out either to a production house or to end users. You have to be extremely careful with every step, down to the premaster codes, if needed.

Does any of your existing / remaining media specify what kind of die it is? You might be able to google on that to see if anyone is selling that type of media at a good price.

Sorry about the 80 minute comment. I thought that some of the manufacturers had started playing around with the spacing of the guide grooves. CD Recordable used to have an excellent tutorial of CDR manufacture at one time. They have since taken it down. In any case, they may be another good source for various media types.

That link to CDR Outlet might prove fruitful. I'm going to email them and see if they know which brands in their stock are still the cyanine dye type.

I also came across this from Google - searching for cdr media cyanine dye. Cyanine is the original dye from the earliest of the CDR media manufactured. This site is pretty neat, and gives a breakdown of modern brands (copyright date goes to 2004) and gives projected dye type and family.

Tony, have you tried any memorex or tdk black colored cd's? They are exactly like the early playstation cds. I've never had a problem with them.

I've *seen* the black colored CDs (Hugo gave me some stuff on them last year at Amersfoort), and they are really cool looking, I hadn't seen them before up until that time. But I don't have any blanks to test with. Haven't tried buying any yet.

Problem is, because the black plastic hides prying eyes from seeing the substrate material, I have no idea what kind of dye lies under that plastic. My guess is that the dye beneath the plastic is going to be exactly the same as the normal TDK and Memorex media. Memorex I know for sure is the yellow stuff, I haven't seen TDK discs in a while.

Verbatim at one point had the dark dye. Finding a place that sells sampler packs of their various discs might be an idea. That way you'll definitely know what you're getting as you'll get a disc to test.

The only drive I've ever had problems regarding discs is my Toshiba combo CDRW/DVD drive. It burns discs that don't always get recognised in certain CD players. The disc is fine and will work perfectly in every other player or drive I've tried. Luckily my NEC DVD burner doesn't have that problem.

Thought about starting your own CDR manufacturing plant?

In theory the discs they give you in the sampler packs should be the current ones as it'd be pretty pointless if they weren't...

I have a bunch of random blanks, including some of the black CDs. These were from PNY Technologies - Black Diamond CD-R. I also have some assorted colors of Memorex CDR media. If you want to experiment, let me know and I will send you some to test. I also just found an entire sleeve (100) of unbranded CDR media that is not quite as dark as the original cyanine, but certainly not any of the modern clear (or near clear) dyes...

Honestly, I'd just buy new drive. You can get a good 52x for about $35, or even get a DVD-/+RW for about $75. The newer drives are very reliable; I haven't made a coaster in years. It'll save you all this hassle of looking for specific media, which is only going to get worse as time goes on, and you'll be much happier burning at 52x.

In my experience with many types of CD and DVD burners, I find all the recent ones (last 3 years) pretty good, but for longer lasting CDs I still drop burn speed down to 4X or 8X as although 52X is fine for short term, the burn doesn't appear to last as long (might be technically incorrect, but that is the symptom)

I stand corrected.

So that's an interesting point. I should see if the newer light-colored media works on my drive provided it's not the 80-minute kind.

Although I do note that the 80-minute discs *do* work fine in the burner as long as they're the dark green kind. Have for years. So perhaps it has nothing to do with it.