My best advice to you would be to ditch DirectCD ASAP. That is so shitty software right there. You don't need to be able to drag and drop burn in explorer. Thats just asking for trouble. Get rid of that and use EasyCD Creator by itself, or get Nero or CDRWIN.
After that, make sure both of your drives have DMA turned ON. right click on 'My Computer', goto 'Properties', 'Device Manager', and double click on your CDROM drives. make sure the DMA check box is enables on both.
[Interesting side note: my HP 9110i Burner worked fine for a year w/ DMA on, but the past 6 mos it's been screwing up all burns except audioCD.. I called tech support, and they suggested turning DMA off on BOTH drives, and it actually WORKED. of course accesses are slow as hell, but at least burning works again..]
Also before you start a burn make sure all other programs aren't running, and ctrl-alt-del and turn everything off except of Explorer and Systray. Then start your burning software and you wont have to worry about other stupid little programs stealing resources.
I dont know where you guys heard that audio is harder to burn, thats the type of CD that worked the most consistantly for me. I'm not saying your wrong, just relating my expereince I've never had to go under 8x to burn it, and i've burned probably 50-60 audio cds. data on the other hand....
for more than you ever wanted to know about burning: http://www.cdrinfo.com/
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on the Path of the Way