Thursday, February 08, 2007

iTunes + new computer + XP updates = Bad!

I was finally blessed with a new computer last week after 5 years at the college. The warm fuzzies associated with my new toy quickly faded as I soon discovered I could no longer backup my iTunes purchases to CD. If it were just my personal purchases I wouldn't worry about it and move on, but I need to keep backups of the audiobooks I purchase as part of the library's new iPod/MP3 service (it finally launched after a year in the making!!! - more about that later).

When I tried to make a backup of my newest purchases on iTunes I was presented with the message: 'the attempt to burn a disc failed. an unknown error occured (4280)'. I called in the big guns (my buddy in IT) to check it out and make sure my drive was functioning properly - it passed with flying colors. Google wasn't much help either. Lots of people have my problem too, but most of them have Sony drives that broke after an XP update and the fix from Apple and Microsoft didn't work for me and my new Dell.

After playing with it for a while I discovered a fix of my own that I thought I'd share...
1. Open iTunes (I'm on version 7.something)
2. Choose 'Edit' then 'Preferences'
3. Click on the Advanced tab
4. Click on the Burning tab
5. Change the prefered speed from 'Maximum Possible' to your drive speed in the drop down box. If you don't know your drive speed, try 4x.
6. Make sure the radio button next to "Data CD" is selected.

Now try Backing up to Disc again.

1 comment:

tatertot5887 said...

i had that same problem and we thought it was our drive so we paid 200 dollars to get and new drive and turns out it wasnt the drive we have a dell xp computer and as of now we only have one type of cd that works with our computer and that is maxell all other types of cds i would get that message maybe that will help you so you wont have to burn cds at 4x speed because i know it takes a long time