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TICKET ARCHIVE -> "Laser Not Calibrating" in iTunes 7

smaxwell - Dec 20, 2007 - 10:09 am

Good Morning!

I'm getting an intermittent problem burning a playlist to CD using iTunes 7.5. I'd be tempted to think it was the CD burner, but the problem is identical on two different Macs with two different makes of internal burners. One machine is an iMac G5 running the latest Leopard, the other is an eMac running the latest Tiger.

Sometimes the burn works fine, other times this error occurs. I suspect it's a software flaw in this version of iTunes, but I've been unsuccessful unistalling iTunes and reinstalling an earlier version.

What should I do?

Thanks very much,

Steve

DeltaMac - Dec 20, 2007 - 6:52 pm

A laser power calibration error is usually a bad drive.
Is it possible to have two drives in different Macs bad at the same time?
Eh, grand coincidence, but if one drive can fail, then two can also fail. The odds against that would be really high, I suppose, but still something to consider.

On both Macs :
Have you tried burning with a different brand of CD-R? You may have a bad batch, and an intermittent problem will be hard to verify.

Can you successfully burn a data CD in the finder?

smaxwell - Dec 22, 2007 - 4:14 pm

Thanks for your help. I'm away from home for a week, so I can't test the problem further right now. That said, CDs do burn fine in the Finder. I'll be getting another batch of CDs to try. I've heard that Imation are quite reliable. Do you have a favourite brand?

P.S. I've researched this problem online and I've read of other users who have had their drives replaced, only to find that the problem remains.

My next plan is to get rid of iTunes 7 and replace it with 6 and see what happens.

Bye for now,

Steve

DeltaMac - Dec 22, 2007 - 7:46 pm

Imation is a good brand.
My favorite, no question - Taiyo Yuden, then Verbatim. Surprisingly, I also like Sony brand CD-Rs. In this situation, I would suggest that you try a disk sold as an audio CD-R.

I also suggest downloading and installing the Combined updater for whatever OS X version you are presently using. (Leopard does not have that yet, but the 10.5.1 download is good, too.) Try this before you go ahead with whatever else you want to try.
I don't think that downgrading to some older version will be helpful, and, of course, the newer iPods won't like that older version at all. (I've been wrong before, so you can choose to ignore my recommendations) If downgrading works, then that's great! I would try downgrading last....
- Dale