I am new to using nero 5.5 and wanted to know what exactly the 'used read buffer' and also 'recorder buffer level/state' are for.
I've copied a cd to hard drive and when burning the image to cd both these buffer levels go up and down from about 100% to 9%.
Is this ok ?
What do they mean ?
Thanks for any help

The memory buffers temporarily store the data that the burner is about to write to the disc. The write buffer is the critical one, if it falls below about 10% of capacity the burner will stop writting. On drives without Burnproof, justlink etc this causues a buffer underrun & the burn fails.

For info on burnproof & buffers check Plextor's burnproof info page (http://www.plextor.be/English/technical/burnproof.html)

Thanks Darkman.
My writer as got burnproof so hopefully I should be ok.If the burnproof kicks in does it tell you somewhere that it as been used(nero 5.5) ?
I copied a cd at 16x and the write buffer went down to about 9%, how would I know if the burnproof had kicked in ?
Hope you know what I mean.
One other thing Darkman,should the write buffer drop this low on my pc ?
athlon 1700+
512 ddr ram
60 gb hdd
24 x teac writer.
I have also noticed that reading the cd to image is slow,about 8 minutes for a 70 minute audio cd.
sorry for all the questions but you always give good helpful advice.

Be sure to set your buffer and catch in Nero set up. 80 mb and 900mb.:)

Okay, if Buffer Underrun is enabled on Nero, and your burner supports it (BurnProof, JustLink etc..) you will not have underrun problems - technically...

Nero WILL report, at the end of your burn, the number of times you've been 'saved' from underrun....

This happened to me recently - it said the protection had kicked in 9 times - "cool" I thought, "what a useful little of feature" - (I did not keep an eye on the buffer). I go to play / audition the disc (Audio) and found two places in two tracks where the music sounded like a scratched record - repeating over and over again a section of the track... I had to skip to the next track to stop it....

Coincidentally, this was the 1st time I had tried to burn at full speed... I usually burn about 12x, but this time it was at 24x. I re-burned same image at 16x to see what difference that would make, as I suspected the 1st burn was just too fast - and it was - the re-burn at 16x was perfect.

I use Nero 5.5.7.2 with Athlon 1700xp, ECS K7S5A, 40gb 7200rpm (audio files have their own partition), 24xburner, 512DDR, like you - and when I burn at 16x or less my buffer doesn't go below about 96%, but that still doesn’t explain the probs at 24x sigh… I suspect the problem is not so much the pc’s capabilities, rather it’s that we’re pushing our burners too far towards their limits...

So assuming you have no hardware probs, and you’re settings are all optimised, your best bet is probably just to slow your burn down… I don’t really have a problem with that as I’m never in so much of a hurry that 5 minutes is going to stuff up my life…

Re the slow image burn, there is plenty in these pages about that... get reading :hdspin: Essentially, this is not *necessarily* a problem - most burners do not read / write at "reported" speeds as these are 'maximums' only and your read or burn speed will be an average or the total process.. Have you looked at CDSpeed?? There's heaps of reasons this may or may not be a technical problem per se - there's quite a bit of reading on the boards about diagnosis etc.. for this...

Thanks toecutter for your help and good advice

check that dma is enabled on your cd writer on the settings tab in device manager. if it isnt it will give you a warning that it may have undesirable effects, but enable it anyway, and it should sort out your buffer problems.

The way to prevent 'burnproof' from activating is the same as preventing buffer undreruns, if the buffer doesn't fall below 10% then 'burnproof' doesn't have to kick in.

I agree that on some burners you do need to enable DMA.

Also Defrag the Harddrive
close down non-essential applications - pretty much everything except systray & explorer
disable screen savers, power savers and anti-virus software
Don't burn on the fly.

The beauty of 'burnproof' is that you can break these 'rules' without many consequences as burnproof will save you.


Burnproof activating should not cause any write errors, even on audio discs, the gap left between where the burn stops & restarts is under the read error limits so the reader error correction should cover a burnproof gap without you noticing.

Thanks for your replies.I have looked to see if DMA is enabled and it says "transfer mode-PIO only"
Is this ok or should I change it to DMA ?