Controlling rotation speed on DVD and CDRW drives and getting external audio jacks to work

First, all newer PC's (PC's in the last several years) use "Digital" Audio, throuigh the IDE Ribbon I/O cable.  With "Digital" audio, the front panel headphone jacks are disabled.  You would have to convert them to "analog" audio with a separate analog cable between the CD drives and the sound card, which is not possible on many newer systems.  Best to leave it alone rather than try to modify it, since most are not capable of the older analog audio from CD drives.

As far as a speed control, I've never heard of that.  You are the first person that ever brought that up.  Nero is a CD "Burning" program, not a CD playback program.  Nero, like all CD burning programs has an option for the burning speed, but nothing that I know of for playback speed.  I have Nero and don't see any playback speed options.

@fireberd
Nero includes a litte Tool to set the *reading speed* of CD/DVD drives. I think it's called 'Nero Drive Speed'. There are other tools like CDBremse, that can do this, too. http://home.t-online.de/home/Joern.Fiebelkorn/cdbremse.htm
This can be quite useful if you are watching video from a DVD or CD or listening to CD Audio and your CD/DVD drive is too noisy at high speeds.

@laubo
If have the GDR8162B, too. Unfortunately you can't set this drive to another speed as the default speed. AFAIK this is the case with most DVD/CD-ROM drives. But on almost all CD/DVD-R(W) drives you are able to set the same speeds for reading DVDs/CDs which are available when writing to DVDs/CDs. So most likely you can do this on your GCE-8483B with Nero Drive Speed ot CDBreme, too.

Message Edited by littlewhoo on 01-22-2004 06:01 AM

Thank you for your help. I guess I'll plug my headset into my speaker.

Thank you for your help.

Do you use the Bremse CD Throttle? If you do, do you know how to register it, since the site is in German? Also do you know what the different settings mean -- "standby time" and "idle timer?"

I'll check out the Nero speed program, I didn't realize it did that - but I've never had need for that.  But, many people complain about "jerky playback" or interruptions in audio playback and slowing down the speed of a CD or DVD would just add to that problem.

@laubo
Yes, I am using CDBremse myself, because both, my CD/DVD-ROM drive and my CD/DVD-R(W) drive a quite noisy at maximum speed, which can be very annoying when playing back videos from CD. But when throttled down to 8x or even 4x speed, which is more than enough for DivX playback, my CD/DVD-R(W) drive is almost inaudible.

Concerning registration of CDBremse:

All important functions are available in the unregistered version, too.
In the registered version you'll get just these two additional functions (which I dont need):

- autostart option and saving of setting
- individual speed setting for different CDs

According to this page http://home.t-online.de/home/Joern.Fiebelkorn/cdbremse_registrieren.htm you should either send a case of Pepsi Light or 5 EU to the author for registering the software. If you decide to send the money, you should first contact the author of CDBremse via eMail. His address and bank account number can be found on this page, too.

CDBremse Settings:

Idle Timer: Here you can set the amount of time your drive is waiting after accessing the media, before the rotational speed is beeing reduced.

Standby Timer: Here you can set the amount of time your drive is waiting after reducitn the rotational speed, before it stops spinning at all.

To be able to activate these you'll have to check the "Timer einstellen" (set timer) box. But usually you don't need to change these settings.
Besides that not all brands of drives are supporting these options.

"Medienwechsel ueberwachen" (check for media change): Some drives tend to "forget" the speed set by CDBremse after a media change. With this option you can tell CDBremse to set the speed after each media change again.

A few drives are even forgetting the set reading speed when you don't change the media. In this case you'll need to check the "feststellen" (lock) option for this drive.

To my surprise according to the drive compatibility list of CDBremse http://www.cd-bremse.de/drives.htm the drives GDR8160B and GDR8161B are supporting different reading speeds. So you would expect, that the GDR8162B could do this, too. Perhaps the inability of the GDR8162B to change the rotational speed is a result of a Dell specific firmware?

@fireberd

maybe if a CD/DVD is very dirty and/or a drive has a bad error correction, reducing the rotational speed of the drive may cause jerky playback. But usually 4x or 8x speed is sufficient for playing back DivX/Xvid/Wma or other .avi video. For CD-Audio and mp3 even 1x should be ok.