Xbox Vs. CD-R's

[Plasticman]

Unfortunately, Xbox will lose in this area. Apparently, my collegues and I have gone through the experience, resulting in a few returns. Although the Xbox can read some CD-R's, the work it goes through to rip them is so extensive, that it will lead to damaging the DVD drive. Some have already noticed that ripping CD-R's takes a while, and this is the reason.

We took an Xbox and we ripped 50 CD-R's, and then we put it up against an Xbox that come from the box. The Xbox which was ripping CD-R's was a little stuttery in areas of Halo, Gotham, and a few others. The Xbox which was unused ran smoothly.

What does this mean? Well, you shouldn't use CD-R's in your Xbox for one, and you shouldn't even try ripping them for another.

One other problem I've found is with Project Gotham. If you have your music source settings set to <User Radio>, select the tracks you wish to play, and then delete them from the Xbox dashboard, the Xbox will freeze if you try to change your music source setting during the game. The way to fix this is to change the music source settings in the main options menu before you start playing.

These could be reasons why we've recieved 6 Xbox returns since launch.

[Vteck3000]

Of course they don't play CDR's. We have been talking on this subject for awhile now. But they do play CDRW's with no problem. Thats what everyone here is using and thats what i've been using since i got my XBOX and i didn't get any problems.

[Plasticman]

Maybe I should've included CD-RW's as well. All recodable media currently available will wear on your Xbox. I've had my Xbox 5 days before it was released, and we've been doing some testing on a couple diplay units.

Have you ripped 50 CD-R's or CD-RW's yet? I doubt anyone has, we had to do it intentionally to see what would happen. If you noticed, recordable CD's do not rip as fast as manufactured discs. Reason for this is the Xbox is working harder to extract the data from the disc. This eventually leads to pick up problems with the laser. We've ran the Xbox through some severe testing to make sure that certain uses do not harm it in the long run, and we've found out that recordable media does so.

Symptoms are slower loading on some games, skipping, frame rate stutter in cinematics, and poor quality sound.

If you don't believe me, just wait after you peel a few more discs. Don't be surprised if Xbox drops your discs onto the tray before stopping.