Failed Burn

You're wondering how to deal with the "DRStatusStateFailed" message? Well, there are two possibilities.

1. You burned too fast, a reduced speed may work
2. Your drive is not compatible.

Yes it's possible that a CD Burner that can read CD+G media can fail to burn viable discs. This has happened to a number of people. You can tell your drive is simply not compatible if you get the failure message right away. If your drive proceeds thru the burn but later ejects the disc, this indicates you may have burned too fast.

Keep in mind that CD+G Discs are a very different breed if disc which requires special physical hardware (like BluRay or HD-DVD, a regular CD player or DVD player is not capable of plaing them). Updating your "driver" can't possibly solve the problem, because the driver is software. If the physical hardware is absent, then the disc simply can never be read, like in the above example, no amount of software can make a blue laser out of a red one. For more information about that, see this article: Not Capable.

A CD+G disc is technically *also* a CD (digital audio) disc, so any music ripper or disc player can read the audio samples. But the +G part is buried between the audio samples, in a different "subchannel" section of the disc not normally read by audio CD rippers. If kJams says your drive is not compatible, then it's not, and you will need a new Compatible Drive.

Check Your Drive Compatibility.

Disc Burning in System Profiler

If you want me to verify this for you I'm happy to do so. Please send me a system Profiler report on your "Disc Burning" capability. To do this:

1. Apple Menu->About This Mac...
2. Click "More Info…"
3. In the window that comes up, under "Hardware", click "Disc Burning"
4. if it says "Matshita", don't bother with the rest, your drive is NOT compatible, Get a Compatible Drive.
5. If you have more than one disc burner, select the one you used to burn
6. Select all that text on the right, and copy it.
7. Paste it into an <email>dave@kjams.com|email to me</email>, or into the Feedback Form.
8. Send it

Mine looks like this:

 PLEXTOR CD-R PX-W5224A:

 Firmware Revision:           1.03
 Interconnect:                FireWire
 Burn Support:                Yes (PatchBurn)
 Profile Path:                None
 Cache:                       2048 KB
 Reads DVD:                   No
 CD-Write:                    -R, -RW
 Burn Underrun Protection CD: Yes
 Write Strategies:            CD-TAO, CD-SAO, CD-Raw
 Media:                       No

Troubleshooting

1. go to kJams->Preferences->Audio
2. next to "Current Cache Size", all the way to the right, click the "Clear" button
3. wait until the cache size gets down to zero
4. go to your burn playlist
5. show the "Activity" window so it's always visible
6. press the burn button
7. wait for all the "Activity" to finish, now the Burn dialog will come up
8. press Cancel in the burn dialog
9. start to play each song in your play list. do you get graphics? (yes) do you get sound? (yes) do any "Activities" run in the "Activity" window that is NOT called "Ring Buffer"? (no, only "ring buffer" shows)
10. do you have songs you edited with Producer? if so, do these steps too:
    1. open EACH producer song in producer (one at a time)
    2. turn off "high quality playback"
    3. scrub thru the song and verify that the CDG graphics look completely correct (yes! they look great!)
11. stop the playing song (⌘-. (period) or [esc])
12. press the burn button again
13. did the burn dialog come up immediately? (yes) or did "assembling bin/cue file" show? (no) or worse "unpacking..."? (no)
14. go ahead and burn
15. after the burn, re-mount the new disc, did it show up with meta info (yes) (that means you can see correct track names and artists, rather than "Audio Track")
16. do steps 1-3 again
17. start to play each song directly from the newly burnt disc. do you get graphics? (yes) do you get sound? (yes)

If any answers come up that do NOT match my answers, please tell me exactly what step and on what question it failed. Thanks!

If you made it all the way to the last step and it failed only on the last step (no sound or picture is bad) then there is one more step you can take to determine if it is your drive.

1. do not quit!!!
2. eject any disc that is mounted
3. do steps 4-8 above
4. right click on the playlist and pick "reveal in finder"
5. in the window with the .bin and .cue files: go to its containing folder, so you can see the folder that contains the bin and cue fuiles. take that folder, the one that is the name of the playlist, and drag it to the Desktop
6. do steps 1-3 above
7. File->Add To Library…
8. navigate to back to the desktop, into the folder with the .bin file
9. Select the .bin file and hit the add button
10. You will see the disc image mounted as if it were a disc, the songs from your disc burn image should now be there.
11. Play the songs that failed to play when you did the last step in the above list (when you played direct from disc). (Now you're playing direct from the disc burn image, so this will tell me if the burn image was bad to begin with). Did they all play just fine? (yes)

If the above steps worked then we can be pretty sure the problem is your drive. If it failed however, it is probably my fault, so please tell me these two things: Are you on a PowerPC mac or an Intel mac? Did you pitch bend the songs that falied? Did you have "Use Apple Audio Unit for Pitch Bending" pref turned on in the Audio Prefs?