Blank media

How is it that I have no luck burning CDs from a computer? I swear, I've burned maybe two CDs my entire life, and one of those was by accident.

And it's not for lack of trying.

When CD burners first came out for consumer use, I bought one. All of the instructions were written in broken English, but sufficient for me to try my hand at installing the hardware, then trying to get the software to work. This was back when I was actually still using the Windows platform, programming map editors as my first big project, so you can see just how far back this desire to burn CDs goes.

On that map editing project, we had a CD burner at work that I used to burn navigation CDs. Back then, I knew the difference among the red book, orange book and green book formats. I knew which one you wanted to use your music CD player as a data retrieval device, and could actually create multiple CDs that worked for music or data. Of course, that was with a stand alone CD burner that was the size of most stereo equipment, and was $2500 to purchase. Given the cost to burn one CD was $950 at the time, $2500 was a complete bargin.

So, my first attempt at CD burning: complete and utter failure, as well as a waste of $400 plus time.

Fine.

Years later, I tried again with some other CD burners installed on my various desktop systems. I tried with Windows (shudder) boxes, and with Linux boxes. Eventually, upon my conversion to the Holy Church of Mac, I tried on my OSX box.

And then I managed to burn my first music CD.

That was 4 years ago.

Four. Years. Ago.

That was after I messed up I don't know how many blank CDs to get there.

Now, all I want to do is backup my iTunes library to something other than the three external harddrives I have. Is that really so difficult to do? I mean, hello, I've seen Mike use these DVD-R blank media disks in his computer, which is really close to the same as mine. I tried inserting it colored side up, colored side down, blank CDs, blank DVD-R media, all of which my computer not only can write to (according to the system profiler), but is what the computer is requesting. I've bought (and tried the expensive media, and the cheap stuff).

Nothing.

All of it fails. All of it.

What the heck is it with me and burning disks? I swear I have a radiation field around me that ruins all blank media.

I just wish that weren't my super power.