I use a TDK VeloCD drive, 4800B (48x), with the latest firmware.

I burned some albums (mp3 format) to a CD-R, to be played on my riovolt portable mp3 cd player. It occasionally has buffering problems, the audio will stop and has to rebuffer. Normally it does this while the song is still playing but it obviously has serious problems reading the disc so nothing gets buffered in time. This was with Verbatim "48X Certified" DataLifePlus media, made by Mitsubishi Chemical Corporation in Taiwan...

Now, I also burned the same exact thing with IMation 48x media, known for not being the most reliable media in the world (the atip prog tells me its CMC chemicals that makes the disc, they are not very good), but the disc works flawlessly.

One would think Verbatim would be the last type of media to make problems.

Anyone else run into these problems with new Verbatim media?

It's probably not bad media. Verbs are known to make good discs, it's just that your player doesn't happen to like them.

I somehow doubt it my friend, my old cd-r drive was a creative (rebadged liteon). Verbatim discs were basically all I used, and they work flawlessly to this day.

My new drive is a TDK, which is once again a rebadged lite-on.

"Lower the speed," you say? Yes, I have done that. If I burn the disc at 32x it works fine. But... the question remains: if an IMation CD done at 48x works flawlessly and a Verbatim disc does not, what happened?

Burning disc is a little more art than science. In theory it's all binary bits, pits and lands burned into a plastic strata that reflects light. What could be cleaner , if it works on one burner/reader it should work the same on them all.
The reality is that different brands of media and sometimes different batches of the same media react slightly differently to the laser burning the data. The speed of rotation, laser calibration , composition of the media all have slight effects on the size and depth of the pits and lands and also on the slope as a pit transends into a land and vica vera. It's not acually a case of one state means a zero and another state means a one, it's the transition from one state to the other.

So we have a standard called orange book that describes data formats and burning discs, however the light of the laser is opperating at infrared frequencies, so a difference of a few microns can change the reflectivity of the disc.

In the end you can have a good burner, good media and a good player, all complying with the required standards but each is just slightly off, the result is a disc that isn't correctly read all the time.

You've found a solution in burning at a slower speed, this is obviously correcting the burning pattern suficiently on that media for that player.

My point after this drawn out ramble is that none of the components are singley to blame, it's the combination of a number of things that is causing the problem. Put that same media in my burner and use my player and I may well have no problems using a disc burned at maximum speed.