HP 9150 audio reading problem

[Jussi Finnilä]

My brand new HP 9150 cd-writer won't read audio disks. I have no problems with data disks and I can write audio disks, just can't read them. My cd-writer finds the tracks and tracklenghts but won't play them. If I hit the play button, it selects the first track, won't play it even for a second, jumps to 2nd track and so on. I have checked all the cabels. They are working properly. I tried to enable DMA for cd-writer, but windows won't accept it. If I enable that option and restart my computer the DMA option is still disabled. What seems to be the problem?

P.S. This thread has been moevd from Disk to Optical Jukeboxes & Drives. - Hp Forum Moderator

[Gavin_4]

Check what the writer is reconised as in the device manager and take note of the firmware for the drive, go to this site http://www.hp.com/cposupport/nonjsnav/hpcdwriter22589.html select the drive that your system has listed and check for a firmware update.

[Scott_27]

Does the 9150 even support firmware upgrades? I've poked around the support site for several 9000 series drives, and the only software even offered is the "Record Now" software. No firmware, no drivers. Where is the information on the current firmware rev listed?

[Gavin_4]

The 9150i does not have a firmware upgrade. Windows may see the drive as a 9100i or something else which may have a firmware upgrade.

[S Thompson]

I'm not sure that I've fully understood the question so please accept my apologies if what follows is complete rubbish --

CD audio tracks are not like data files and Windows cannot play them without help. If you read an audio CD with Explorer you will see only CDA files. These are simply markers and contain no audio information. An audio file on your hard disk is in a different format and can be played using Windows Media Player.

Windows comes with a CD player program which allows it to control a CD drive with an audio disk in it but the audio doesn't come down the IDE cable. It comes out as actual (ie analogue) audio from the back of the drive and must be fed into a sound card if you want to hear it. Some versions of Windows Media Player can read audio tracks directly, a process known as digital audio extraction (DAE). I tried this on an HP Vectra VE5 series 4 running Win98 and it didn't work.

MyCD and Record Now can do DAE - this is what happens when you make an audio CD from tracks on other CDs - but the audio files are erased from the hard disk after the CD is written. I've never understood why simple DAE to hard disk is not an option on either of these programs but it isn't. The advice from HP is to open Explorer just before writing the disk, look for the temporary files and copy them. My advice is to download EAC from www.exactaudiocopy.de. It's author requests only a picture postcard in return.

And finally --

If you ever use either MyCD or Record Now to create an audio disk from individual tracks, whether from other CDs or from your hard disk, have a close look at the last one. When I used these programs they cut two seconds off the end of the last track on the disk. Has this happened to anybody else?